“‘You keep runnin’, you’ll only go to jail tired,’ Ben Silver muttered.”

In the opening line of Two Wolves, the reader encounters one of the text’s themes: Differing Concepts of Justice. Ben, in this opening scene, is simply setting up the figures he’s using for his stop-motion movie, but the irony of this moment lies in how this line can apply to what’s going to happen to him very shortly—an irony of which the reader is aware but the character is not.

“Ben shook his head, still looking at the officer through a six-inch gap between door and frame. Ben was pleased to see that being slightly overweight didn’t stop you from getting into the force. Ben was slightly overweight himself. His nan said it was from the rotten dinners his parents fed him from the burger chain on the corner.”

This passage grants readers a deeper knowledge of Ben’s character and his parents’ economic situation, background information that will prove to be very important moving forward. The reader finds out here that Ben physically does not match the sort of person he perceives himself to be, which will be a source of insecurity for him and a source of conflict with his father. The mention of the burger chain demonstrates that the family struggles financially, providing motivation for his parents’ theft.

“It felt weird to hear Mum saying ‘family vacation.’ They weren’t really one of those family-movie-night, camp-in-the-backyard, let’s-discuss-this-and-get-everyone’s-opinion kind of families. They were more of a dinner-in-front-of-the-TV, key’s-under-the-mat, if-you-want-breakfast-make-it-yourself kind of family.”

While the previous quotation established the family’s financial situation, this quote characterizes the family’s dynamics. In Ben’s understanding, his is not a close family that spends a lot of time together. This becomes important in understanding Ben’s motivations later on when he decides to go against his parents.