The Way It Is

The Way It Is is the refrain at the heart of the novel’s epigraph: a resigned declaration that things are as they are, followed by an insistence not to believe that they must remain so. The phrase frames the story’s conflicts over Nought and Cross inequality as both a lived reality and a condition people have been taught to accept—and its counterstatement rejects that acceptance.

The Epigraph’s Reversal

The epigraph opens by repeating the claim that this is simply how things are and that some things will never change. The repetition gives resignation the sound of familiar wisdom: a settled account of the world, stated as though it needs no proof. But the final turn, “But don’t you believe them,” breaks that apparent certainty. The word “them” leaves the source of the claim open, while identifying the claim itself as something to resist rather than a neutral description.

The title The Way It Is therefore carries a deliberate tension. It can name the world as people encounter it, but it can also echo the excuse by which an unequal world is defended. The epigraph does not deny that conditions are entrenched; it denies that their persistence makes them natural, right, or beyond challenge. Its compact structure sets up a distinction that recurs through the novel: acknowledging injustice is not the same as conceding that injustice is permanent.

Inequality Made Ordinary

The story gives that distinction institutional form in its account of Nought students entering Heathcroft High. A crowd gathers outside the school shouting, “NO BLANKERS IN OUR SCHOOL. NO BLANKERS IN OUR SCHOOL.” Police try to reach the entrance and push the Cross crowd back, while Callum and three other Noughts are surrounded. The repetition of the slogan turns exclusion into a public demand, making the epigraph’s question of what will supposedly never change visible at a school gate.

The discrimination is not confined to the crowd. In a television report about the school, the violence against Nought pupils is reduced to “some hostility.” The narration notes that the broadcast does not show officers allowing the crowd to reach the students to poke, pinch, and punch them, or the Cross spit covering the back of Callum’s jacket. The gap between what happened and what the report admits shows how a social order can preserve itself not only through open hostility but through accounts that soften or omit its consequences.

A conversation between Mrs Paxton and Mr Costa offers another version of the same exclusion in the language of school policy. When she objects that the Noughts are being picked on, Mr Costa replies, “If the blankers are finding it tough here, then maybe they should go elsewhere.” His response treats the students’ difficulty as a reason for their removal rather than a problem the school must address. The epigraph’s warning against believing in permanence thus speaks to a world where an institution can present exclusion as common sense.

The Phrase Across Institutions

The pattern extends beyond school. At the hospital, a nurse says that, before medical care can be administered, the family’s identity cards must be checked and registered under a new government ruling. She offers preventing benefit fraud as a possible purpose. The scene places routine administration beside the need for care, showing how the state’s identification requirements can enter an intimate, vulnerable setting. Read alongside the school and the news report, the policy belongs to a broader landscape in which unequal power is exercised through procedures as well as insults.

The phrase also resonates in the family’s response to the legal consequences surrounding Sephy’s connection to Callum. Her mother tells her that if she associates with Callum and his family, their names will be dragged through court, newspapers, and public attention, then insists that Sephy should learn that “if you lie down with dogs, you’re bound to get fleas.” The saying treats proximity across the racial divide as contamination and recasts prejudice as practical advice. The epigraph’s refusal to believe those who declare that things cannot change challenges precisely this conversion of social convention into inherited wisdom.

Justice and the Cost of the Status Quo

The prison execution scene brings the divide into its starkest institutional setting. At Hewmett Prison, Sephy arrives with her family and sees Noughts standing before the scaffold, some crying and others looking at the seated Crosses with hatred. She unexpectedly meets Callum’s eyes. The formal announcement identifies his father, Ryan Callum McGregor, as having been found guilty of seven counts of murder and political terrorism, says his appeal has been denied, and declares that his hanging will be carried out.

The scene makes the consequences of the novel’s unequal order impossible to reduce to an abstract debate about whether change is possible. The announcement’s official certainty contrasts with the human shock of Sephy’s recognition: only when the sentence is stated does she understand why she has been brought there. The epigraph does not itself resolve the questions of guilt, justice, or resistance. Instead, its refusal to accept permanence gives these scenes a critical frame: established practices and authoritative language may make an outcome appear inevitable, but the story asks readers not to mistake that appearance for moral necessity.

A Refrain Against Resignation

Credited in the epigraph to Bruce Hornsby and the Range, The Way It Is functions as more than a title borrowed from a song. Its few lines establish a contradiction the novel tests across school, news, family, healthcare, and criminal justice: the world repeatedly presents its arrangements as fixed, while the narrative exposes the people and institutions that maintain them. The return of “That’s just the way it is” makes resignation sound familiar; the answering injunction refuses to let familiarity settle the argument.

The expression’s significance lies in this movement from description to challenge. The novel does not suggest that entrenched discrimination disappears because someone refuses to accept it. It places that refusal against the concrete persistence of segregation, minimization, administrative control, and punitive justice. The epigraph consequently works as a compact interpretive key: it names the fatalism that helps inequality endure and gives the reader a reason to question every claim that the existing order is simply the way things have to be.