Pax is the story of a boy and a fox and how their friendship almost—but not quite—manages to transcend the limitations imposed by nature. In the end, nature trumps nurture when it comes to interspecies relationships. That story is showcased within a “hero’s journey” sort of structure and it is without question the focus of the narrative.
While Peter the boy and Pax the fox are unqualifiedly the dual protagonists of the book without which there would be no story to tell, it is another character that really provides the impetus for the central thematic issue at play in the story. The context of the story of Peter and Pax is the backdrop of a war being conducted by human beings and the collateral damage that such engagements always inflict. Wisely, the author chooses not to make the specifics of the battle clear because, ultimately, details don’t matter. One war is pretty is much the same as another as far as the logic and rationale of these things go. Suffice to say that war is ravaging across some place for reason at some time in some place and this is the stimulus behind the enforced separation of boy and fox. The separation is the stimulating event that drives Peter on his heroic journey to save his little animal buddy and during that journey he gets injured and comes into contact with a strange and slightly menacing woman named Vola. Vola has pretty much retired from human contact, living alone in the woods and variously taking on the role of monstrous witch with her wooden leg and Obi-Wan Kenobi-type wise instructor in the ways of the world.
In a previous life, however—one live about twenty years earlier—she was a medic taking part in another war between some opponents taking place in some place at some time for some reason. Keep in mind this is a book written for a young readership featuring a story about a friendship between a boy and a fox. The very fact that war is having tangible collateral damage upon the characters yet the war itself is not the centerpiece of the plot is in itself something strange and wondrous to behold. What is also wondrous to behold is that it is this secondary character—as significant as she may be—who gives voice to what really lies at the heart of the story’s message.
Vola was a medic, as mentioned, and not a warrior. She was not a soldier. She did not go into battle expecting to become a killer, yet in her own words that is precisely what she became. She confesses to Peter that she “probably killed a lot of people, or at least contributed to their deaths.” But there is one death in particular that has so haunted her she has spent the last two decades trying to reconcile the realty of the world with what she realized in a moment of crystal-clear epiphany. The immature Peter has not yet had time enough to adjust to the shock of Vola admitting to killing a person much less work up the intellectual understanding to fully appreciate the emotional toll it took upon Vola. And then things get even more complicated as she tries to get across that profundity of that epiphany:
“I realized something then: that even though he was a man, even though he was a different race, even though he had grown up in a different country—we might have had a lot in common.”
She goes to explain how she realized that the things they might have had in common were a lot more important than the only commonality immediately apparent: they had both been drafted into war service. Her confessions goes to the admission of searching his clothes as he lay dying trying to find things that might have given a clue to what he was like and that search turns up a copy of a book: The Seven Voyages of Sinbad.
This confession and this epiphany form the foundation upon which the narrative rests. It is, in miniature, the entire meaning behind the story. The narrative of a boy and fox reaching across the chasm of divergence in species to form an intense bond of friendship so powerful that the boy is willing to put his life in danger just to save his little furry friend says it all. Humans have more in common with each other than they do with any animal and yet it often seems most of it are willing to go to the ends of the earth to save a stray animal yet we don’t blink twice about the fact that humans are killing humans in some war in some place every single day of our existence on this planet.
