Robert Dunbar on the latest offerings from Joan O'Neill, Kate Thompson and Eoin Colfer
In December 1990, a review of Joan O'Neill's Daisy Chain War (Hodder £5.99), under the heading "Irish teen fiction comes of age", appeared in these pages, heralding the welcome arrival of a new writer catering for what today would be designated a young adult readership.
The novel enjoyed considerable commercial success, won a Reading Association of Ireland award and was followed by two further titles - Bread and Sugar and Daisy Chain Wedding - chronicling the fortunes of various members of the Doyle family living in the Dún Laoghaire of the 1940s and 1950s. Published originally in Ireland, the trilogy has recently been reissued, with attractive period covers, by British publisher Hodder, which now also brings us Daisy Chain War.
O'Neill's ability in her earlier fiction to re-create convincingly the social detail of a particular historical era is more than matched here by her strong grasp of contemporary mores. Beth Corrigan, her 15-year-old heroine, is very recognisably a teenager of our time, one who frequently gives voice to her impatience with the process known as growing up. The arrival in her life of Alexandru, a handsome young Bosnian refugee, hastens that process, but not without consequences for her family, her schoolfriends, her visiting Canadian cousin and, above all, her developing sexuality.
In her depiction of Beth's adolescence, O'Neill moves with ease and assurance through the complexities of a rapidly changing Irish teenage world. She excels particularly in seeing beneath its surfaces and in juxtaposing its moments of near ecstasy and those of near despair. "The summer's coming soon", its final paragraph reminds us: and this is a great read for the season.
While some of Kate Thompson's previous novels have shown a fondness for setting the destinies of her characters in a vividly realised natural world, she has never quite attained the magical blend of person and place with which she provides us in Annan Water (Bodley Head, £10.99) Ostensibly, her story is the story of teenagers Michael and Annie, a love story progressing from a dramatic first encounter to a series of almost unbearable developments in the young couple's apparently inexorable journey towards destruction. But, just as powerful, there is the additional story to be found originally in the ancient ballad of the book's title, the words and echoes of which are hauntingly used as an accompanying complementary text.
The "dark expanse of water" and the tragedy buried beneath it come strongly into focus as we follow Michael and Annie in their attempt to share and exorcise their own past traumas. The tortured histories and present circumstances of both their families, the isolated Scottish setting and the hardships of economic survival in the competitive world of horse-trading and show-jumping combine to create a sequence of barriers to easy resolution, but Thompson's sympathy with the need of the young to articulate and fulfil their dreams is never in question.
Rather as Michael feels at one point that he is being "summoned" by the "deep song " of the Annan, the reader of Thompson's novel is impelled by her mesmeric prose to enter a state of total surrender to a narrative which never loses its hold. The style and structure, though spare and taut, still manages to allow room for interweaving fictions which, at times, are heartbreaking in their poignancy.
There is a moment in Eoin Colfer's The Supernaturalist (Puffin, £12.99) when Cosmo, its 14-year-old hero, reflects, "I'm inside a cartoon . . . This is all a graphic novel . . ." He has certainly grasped the essentials of his creator's literary technique in this highly entertaining futuristic romp in which the quick-fire energy of authorial invention rarely flags. In Satellite City - "the City of the Future" - Cosmo has finally succeeded in escaping from the orphanage known as the Clarissa Frayne Institute for Parentally Challenged Boys, only to find other challenges waiting. Enter the Supernaturalists, an oddly diverting band of vigilantes who enlist Cosmo in their battle against oppression. While the technology and the humour will appeal to younger readers, it will take a sophisticated teenager to appreciate fully the novel's darker moments, its numerous twists of plot and its metaphysical concerns.