YOUNG ADULT:HUMOUR IS as rare a phenomenon in young adult fiction as in most other literary genres. Where it exists at all, it is often merely gratuitously coarse or merely gratuitously silly: subtlety and wit are in short supply, writes ROBERT DUNBAR
Considerations like these make a book such as Saci Lloyd's The Carbon Diaries 2017(Hodder, £6.99) very welcome, not least in its creation of a teenage heroine, Laura Brown, who determinedly steers her way through her young life, managing in the process to juggle the various demands made by her parents, her friends, her university studies and, above all, her music and her band.
One of her lyrics – “I need to know / My destination / This is my quest / For liberation” – provides the theme linking these various concerns, but there is more at stake here than the pursuit of simply personal adolescent obsessions.
Lloyd, skilfully employing a first-person diary format, places Laura’s escapades within the England of only a few years away, dominated by societal (and especially ecological) malaise. Serious matters: but it is the sharpness of Laura’s observations and her essential good humour that enable a bridge to be built successfully between the weighty and the apparently trivial.
There are few concessions to "good humour" in Paul Hoffman's The Left Hand of God(Michael Joseph, £12.99), a novel that seems very uncertain as to its target readership and, indeed, as to many details of its narrative. With a vaguely medieval setting, a range of both real and fictional locations and a gallery of both thinly sketched and (once or twice) more rounded characters, its 400 or so pages seem likely to tax the patience of many younger readers.
In essence, the plot provides a study of religious fanaticism in its most sadistic manifestations, as we are introduced to an institution known as The Sanctuary of the Redeemers, and to Cale, one of its teenage inmates, whose role it will be to uncover some of the sect’s more awful practices, to escape and, somewhere along the way, to experience the first onsets of love and sexuality. Where it is not predictable it all becomes rather preposterous, and what are presumably intended as its elements of religious satire are awkwardly heavy-handed.
By contrast, Markus Zusak's Fighting Ruben Wolfe(Definitions, £5.99) is distinguished by its lightness of touch, an almost paradoxical characteristic of a novel that focuses on boxing. But much more than what happens in the ring is at the heart of the matter here. Set in contemporary Australia, this is a punchy and gritty tale of two brothers, both of whom, to help their family survive in pressing financial circumstances, become caught up in the boxing world.
With the younger brother, Cameron, acting as narrator, and the older, Ruben, acting as the more powerful pugilist, Zusak creates an impressive and heart-warming story of fraternal and familial bonding, in which daily hardship and near despair are alleviated by determination and earthy humour. Stylistically, and particularly in its frequent use of the short, forceful sentence, the novel is – well – a knockout.
Prison narratives, whether fictional or real-life memoirs, rarely provide uplifting reading experiences: the temptation for their writers is to fall into either the melodramatic or the sentimental.
JA Jarman's Inside(Andersen, £5.99) largely escapes both dangers in its study of 17-year-old Lee and his time spent in a British Institution for Young Offenders. The regime is far from comfortable and Lee's story soon becomes a series of survival strategies as he adapts to institutional conventions, especially where these concern the often conflicting relationships with staff and fellow inmates. Additionally, matters from the outside world, involving his mother and his girlfriend, continue to impinge on his imprisonment. It all amounts to a bleak, cheerless and complex environment for the teenager, where violence, or the threat of violence, is omnipresent and where the only humour visible is of the black, gallows variety.
It is with considerable relief that we return, in Sarra Manning's Nobody's Girl(Hodder, £5.99), to the outside world, the one inhabited by 17-year-old Bea and her group of "friends". The inverted commas are necessary as these are very unpredictable young women, volatile in their mood swings and unreliable in their loyalties. Still, Bea risks a Spanish holiday with them, but is rapidly disenchanted and embarks on a solo trip which, via Bilbao, takes her to Paris and, she hopes, to the father she has never known. On the way, there are backpacking American students (including the handsome Toph) to be encountered and, eventually, the joys of Paris to be shared and savoured. The tone throughout is light and frothy, the dialogue bouncy and amusing, even when at its most sarcastic.
If at times the plot enters domains beyond immediate credibility, it can not be denied that Manning has expert knowledge of youthful group dynamics, and of those adolescent moments when matters of no great significance to the rest of us assume levels of over-riding importance. Clearly, she has a sense of humour and the ability to transfer it to her fiction.
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children’s books and reading
