THERE is a well known poem by Yevtushenko called Lies, which begins with the line: "Telling lies to the young is wrong". It is a quotation which raises matters not only of moral concern but also, paradoxically perhaps, of literary interest: "telling" the young lies may indeed be "wrong" but encouraging them to read lies, in the form of fiction, seems to be a different matter. This latter objective derives from a belief that fiction, or at least quality fiction, contains its own truths, which - to use the metaphor employed by the organisers of this weekend's Summer School on children's literature - can let in the light to illuminate the darkness of our realities.
The "truths" and "lies" of life and fiction rarely meet with such provoking starkness as they do in White Lies and Angels Without Wings, two new teenage novels by Mark O'Sullivan (Wolfhound, £3.99 each). "Lies can be easy to live with if you bury them deep enough," reflects Nance, the heroine, towards the beginning of the former; but as the novel progresses she is to move from this state of acquiescence to a determination to ascertain the full truth about how, as a young black woman, born in Africa, she has now come to be living in a small town in contemporary rural Ireland.
By the time we leave her we may clearly understand her comment that "I knew it wasn't going to be easy to live with what I know": but the darkness of ignorance has at least been scattered. Her story is skillfully interwoven with that of the young man known as OD, whose own particular quest for truth demands a resolution of his relationship with the man whom at the out- set he dismisses as "a failed musician, a failed husband, a failed father". Beyond Nance and OD, there are other young lives growing towards a state of self acceptance; watch out especially for Seanie Moran's moment of declaration, and rejoice that Irish young people's fiction has reached the stage where such light can shine.
O'Sullivan's fascination with fiction's potential to act as the ultimate teller of truths is given even more intriguing expression in Angels Without Wings. Set in the bookburning world of Nazi Berlin, this clever, wise and often poignant story sees a group of four young people from a popular series of German children's adventure stories step out from their fictional pages to confront an evil which is cruelly real - and to face the challenges of finding a place in the world which remains when the confrontation has taken place. With its alternate chapters (and alternate type settings) reflecting "real" and "fantasy" domains, this is, in true postmodernist style, a novel about novels, where the characters are indeed characters: only the reader, as its epigraph reminds us, by the power of imagination can give them wings to fly.
As we leave Elvin Bishop, the 14 year old hero of Chris Lynch's wickedly funny Slot Machine (Poolbeg, £3.50), we witness a further example of fiction's power to transform reality. Nearing the end of three wretched weeks at summer camp, having been subjected to every possible misguided adult attempt to coerce him into one macho "slot" after another, Elvin finds salvation in the library, in the form of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg. Ohio, and its young hero's decision "to go away and look at people and think". Lynch captures brilliantly the dark truth behind the posturing and manipulation of all male worlds (adolescent and adult) and triumphantly nails the lie that, in youthful progress to maturity, conformity is the greatest virtue.
WHILE Greta Mulrooney's Crossing The Line (Poolbeg, £3.99) is, both in theme and form, a more conventional teenage novel than either O'Sullivan's or Lynch's, it too refuses to shirk its responsibility to face up to particular truths. In following the developing relationship of Ella (young Irish woman now living in Camden and Carlos (young Cuban man, even further from home) we see them move from adolescent tentativeness to open acceptance of a more assured sexuality. Adult prejudice, racial and social, is overcome; prevarication gives way to honesty; the lights of Manchester - where Carlos will be a student and Ella a visitor - beckon.