A list of the characters appearing in the Chaos Walking Trilogy, comprising The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, and Monsters of Men, by Patrick Ness. Alliances and factions evolve throughout the series; the following list is divided into groups as they are at the beginning of the war.
Main characters
Todd Hewitt
Todd Hewitt is the protagonist of the series. When the trilogy begins, he is one month shy of turning thirteen. (Note that New World follows a thirteen-month calendar, meaning he is actually about fourteen Earth/Old World years at the beginning of the series.) Brought up by his adoptive parents, Ben and Cillian, Todd was kept unaware of Prentisstown’s history until the end of the first book.
Mayor Prentiss prevented Todd from gaining an education, and consequently, Todd’s narrative is illiterate and unrestricted. He cannot read or write, a problem that has prevented him from reading his mother’s diary and communicating with Viola from the scout ship in book three. His voice has been described as "science fiction's Huckleberry Finn."
In The Ask and the Answer, Todd is forced to follow the Mayor's commands in his militaristic regime, The Ask. He first commits acts of cruelty against Spackle (branding them), but later on the Mayor enforces the same acts on women. This raises questions about the justification of actions when the perpetrator is 'following orders'. Without Viola, he starts to become colder and emotionally detached from the dire situation. He is at first forced to do so because Viola is under the Mayor’s control, but as the novel progresses, Todd starts to lose who he really is. It is only until Mayor Prentiss reveals his plans that Todd sees he must fight him to save Viola, and New Prentisstown.
Throughout the novels, Todd is repeatedly pressured to murder another human being in order to fulfil Mayor Prentiss’ plans. However, his character is labelled unable to kill, until the end of The Ask and The Answer, where his noise reveals that he would kill for Viola. This then leads him to participate in war, and he has since killed many Spackle in self-defence, though has not killed any men. In Monsters of Men, Todd’s character encounters further challenges. When spending time with the Mayor, the two develop a link (denoted by a small humming in their Noise). Todd gains control over his Noise, thus allowing him to silence it, use it as a weapon, learn with it, and use it to control other people. However, in the end it is revealed that by silencing one’s Noise, the attack power of the Noise is decreased. Todd ends up trusting the Mayor again, and saves him unconsciously from death several times. However, when Ben shows up, Todd's bond with the Mayor breaks. The skills taught to him ultimately allow Todd to defeat the Mayor in a battle using only his Noise.
The Sky, 1017, mortally wounds Todd near the end of Monsters of Men, mistaking Todd for the Mayor, though he admits that he wasn’t sure when he fired his weapon. Todd’s Noise leaves, returning in small bursts, and he remains in a coma-like state at the end of book three. However, the final chapter hints that he will wake so long as Viola keeps ‘calling’ him.
A short story released in May 2013 reveals that Todd has awoken from his coma, but no further details have been provided.
Viola Eade
Viola Eade had recently turned thirteen (twelve-month calendar) when she crash-landed on New World with her parents. She was the sole survivor of the crash; her father perished in the fire that caused the crash, while her mother lived for only a few moments following it. She and her family were part of a scouting party sent ahead by a group of new settlers. Her mother was the best pilot on the ship while her father was a skilled engineer of their settlers' spacecraft, the Delta.
Her looks are not described explicitly in the novels, the only description being that her hair is short and that her skin is pale. Later on in the 1st book, Viola is described as being smaller than Todd. She was one of the top students on the Delta (out of all the caretaker families' children) and was taught how to survive on the new planet. She saves both of their lives by using a campfire box to set off an explosion, destroying a bridge just before the Mayor's men had caught up to her and Todd.