Children's LiteratureSiobhan Dowd was a key speaker at the Children's Books Ireland summer conference in 2007. She gave a fascinating speech about growing up in London, her visits to Ireland and the stories her Irish parents told her - which have resulted in two excellent "Irish" teenage novels. She died (unexpectedly, to most listeners) that year.
Her first novel, A Swift Pure Cry, was a tour de force, winning the Branford Boase and the Eilís Dillon awards and being shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the Booktrust Teenage Prize. It, like bog child, was set in Ireland in the early 1980s and was based on a historical incident. Her second novel, The London Eye Mystery, (written first but published later) lacks the multilayered, poetic qualities of the two Irish novels: it takes place in contemporary London and is basically a detective mystery, albeit with a fascinating young boy with a degree of autism as its hero.
A lot is going on in bog child. Mel, the girl whose skeleton Fergus finds in the bog, confides in him from her Iron Age village; the apolitical, 18-year-old Fergus is blackmailed into acting as courier for the IRA; Fergus's older brother, Joe, is on hunger strike at Long Kesh; an archaeologist from Dublin brings her teenage daughter, Cora, to investigate the find, and Fergus falls in love; the IRA lurks; and, throughout the novel, the physics equations which Fergus is studying for A-levels (his passport out of Northern Ireland) form a rational counterpoint to the irrational loves and hates around him. But Dowd interweaves the strands well, handles dialogue excellently (using it to provide a leavening of humour) and writes a lyrical descriptive prose. Her characters avoid stereotypes and her device of placing the burial site right on a somewhat uncertain border gives her a chance to show that gardaí and RUC, and even British squaddies, could work together even at the height of the Troubles: "A man's a man for a' that".
Mel is a mirror image of Fergus: her father, too, would sacrifice his family for what he thinks is right whereas his mother just wants peace. Both stories move inexorably to parallel climaxes and it is a tribute to Dowd's writing that the resolution in Fergus's case, which is amusing rather than fatal, convinces. But the intrusion of Mel's voice into Fergus's head and the use of modern idiom in Iron Age speech (though how else would one transcribe it?) jarred for me. The point Cora's mother makes, "That's what history is, a warning", could have been made through parallel stories rather than by ESP. And it is unfortunate that no one checked the accuracy of the important first chapter where atmosphere and scene are set and the main characters introduced: would anyone bag wet, newly-cut turf, let alone smuggle it back across the Border to sell?
Bog child is a posthumous novel. In Dowd's handling of complicated plot strands, her lyrical prose, her humanity and her humour, we recognise a talent which has been very sadly cut short. Her fourth novel, Solace of the Road, will be published by David Fickling in spring 2009.
Margrit Cruickshank is a retired bookseller and a writer of fiction for children and young adults
bog child By Siobhan Dowd David Fickling Books, £10.99