Young Adult Fiction: Demons are faced in five new novels, writes Robert Dunbar
Any young adult novel which chooses to focus on a school setting and, in particular, on the themes of institutional bullying and corruption, will almost inevitably invite comparison with Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War. This is even more likely to be the case when, as with Beth Goobie's The Lottery (Faber & Faber, £9.99), the novel openly acknowledges its indebtedness to the Cormier original and "the possibilities he (Cormier) brought to young adult literature". It is a tribute to Goobie that, drawing on these possibilities, she succeeds in creating her own powerful and, at times, quite frightening narrative.
Set in Canada, in the co-educational world of Saskatoon Collegiate School, The Lottery deals essentially with the dilemma of an individual student, 15-year-old Sally, who feels impelled to stand up to the threats and psychological games indulged in by the school's sinister "Shadow Council". The complexities of disturbing the universe have to be faced, a process in which we come to realise the interdependence of victim and assassin and the often fickle nature of adolescent friendships.
Michelle (or, as she is always called, Shell), the heroine of Siobhan Dowd's A Swift Pure Cry (David Fickling, £12.99), is, like Sally, 15. In her case, however, the demons to be faced arise as a result of the environment - Coolbar, a village in Co Cork in the Ireland of the early 1980s - in which she is growing up. For many readers the themes here will have haunting echoes of a period in our history dominated by headlines concerning such tragedies as those of Anne Lovett and the Kerry babies case .
With their mother dead, Shell has to assume the responsibility of bringing up a younger sister and brother and to cope with the volatile temperament of an alcoholic and ostentatiously Catholic father. Add to these demands the predictable outcome of her relationship with Declan, a fellow teenager, and her confused feelings about Father Rose, a young priest: the materials are at hand for a novel which, at its best, almost reaches into the dark and repression of McGahern territory, represented here in microcosm by a village which Declan at one point refers to as "an excrescence on the face of the earth".
Such a perception is not far removed from the "village of the bloody year" description accorded to Torbeck, the English Lake District setting for Gareth Thompson's remarkable debut novel, The Great Harlequin Grim (Doubleday, £10.99). Here, the perception is that of 13-year-old Glenn Jackson, who, with his father, has moved to Torbeck, leaving behind his mother in their native Burnley. His new surroundings, often experienced as threatening, provide the location where, as he himself acknowledges, he is "growing up fast".
This journey towards fuller understandings of life and its potential for unexpectedness is accelerated by his encounter with the "great harlequin" of Thompson's title, an 18-year-old giant (more than seven feet tall) who has his own history of tragedy and loss. The poignant manner in which the two young men, in spite of apparent differences, move towards trust and friendship is effectively counterpointed by Glenn's developing relationship with a local girl called Laura and by his (and his father's) responses to the domestic gap left by an absent mother and wife.
Yet another dark village, on this occasion Lychcombe in Devon, serves as setting for Kevin Brooks's The Road of the Dead (The Chicken House, £8.99). Landscape, specifically the eerily desolate world of Dartmoor, is an integral element of this chilling and frequently violent novel. Ruben and Cole, two teenage brothers, travel from their home territory of London's East End to Lychcombe, in an attempt to solve the mystery of their sister's murder. Their quest will bring an enhanced appreciation of the nuances of their own relationship and of the links which exist between them, their mother and father and their travelling community.
The greatest strength of Brooks's novel, however, is the manner in which - in spite of its powerful contemporary atmosphere - the brothers' discoveries are made in a setting where a grim history continues to cast an atavistic shadow. The "road of the dead", it turns out, has been long travelled. It is hardly surprising that Ruben, about to start his journey along it, should sense "something in the air that made me think of sadness and longing".
The note of "sadness and longing" in O R Melling's The Hunter's Moon (Amulet, £9.95) is prefigured in Yeats's "world more full of weeping than you can understand", which serves as her epigraph. This beautifully produced new edition of her 1992 novel, dealing with two teenage cousins' foray into the ancient world of Irish myth, matches high production values with literary sophistication. It is a welcome reminder that social realism in young adult fiction, however compelling, is not necessarily the most convincing way of interpreting the realities of our lives, adolescent or otherwise. Perhaps the true test, as Granny Harte suggests to Gwen, the Irish cousin, is "to keep faith in the dark". It is an aspiration that the authors of these five novels have notably borne in mind.
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children's books and reading