While Irish fiction for young adults has in recent years extended its range of theme and subject matter, it remains essentially a conservative genre in terms of form and style. There are beginnings, middles and ends - and usually in that order. The last few books of Siobhan Parkinson, in their willingness to experiment with multiple narrators, stories within stories and stream of consciousness effects, have been welcome exceptions to these generalisations. Now, with the appearance of her Breaking The Wishbone (O'Brien, £4.99), comes a novel which, paradoxically, does not seem like a novel at all: the result is a venture of high risk, but one that succeeds magnificently.
This is the novel as documentary, featuring five homeless Irish teenagers, each of whom individually faces up to the Parkinson camera and reveals in flat realist style (frequently punctuated with humour) the string of consequences which have led to their present shared Dublin squat. But while these soliloquies apparently focus on opening windows onto the real world of city homelessness, with all its violence, despair and alienation, they are also extremely cleverly shaped narratives, interlinking and uniting to provide a pleasingly non-judgmental work of fiction. The language is often frank, the detail often gory, but the overall impression is of the heart-warming notion that hope can grow in even the darkest of circumstances.
By contrast, there is no hope whatsoever to be glimpsed in Tom Baker's The Boy Who Kicked Pigs (Faber, £12.99 in UK), though the circumstances are admittedly very dark indeed. Here is an incredibly ghoulish story of a pathologically misanthropic 13-year-old who sets in motion a series of appalling events, deriving sadistic pleasure from knowing that others are suffering from the mayhem he is causing. Perhaps, as Ardal O'Hanlon's blurb advises us, it is "above all very funny": there is certainly one very good joke about coq au vin. But, in the main (and not least in the sickeningly horrific closing pages, even if this is where our young hero meets his nemesis), this is one for those with very strong stomachs.
IT IS with some relief that one turns, after Baker, to the more mainstream young adult fiction of two reissued novels by the Ulster writer Sam McBratney (Mammoth, £4.99 each in UK). In You Just Don't Listen, a 16-year-old daughter confronts an unexpected family development whereby her widowed mother is contemplating remarriage, while in Funny How The Magic Starts we find its heroine gradually reconsidering her initial responses to the arrival in the neighbourhood of a new and apparently unprepossessing teenage male. McBratney observes the domestic, school and social settings of his characters with insight and wit, attaining a delicate balance between adult certainties and adolescent vulnerabilities. Michael Morpurgo's Kensuke's Kingdom (Heinemann, £8.99 in UK) provides a further, and often very touching, portrayal of an encounter between youth and age, played out here in a desert-island setting. A 12-year-old boy, thrown overboard by a violent storm while he, his parents and dog are sailing around the world, reaches an island where, some forty years on, a Japanese soldier from World War Two days is the only other inhabitant. Writing very much in an adventure-story tradition which goes back at least to Robinson Crusoe, Morpurgo traces with great subtlety the growth of the evolving friendship between boy and man, early distrust and apprehension on both sides eventually giving way to respect and admiration. This, incidentally, is a beautifully produced book, complete with atmospheric black and white maps and illustrations by Michael Foreman.
With Pauline Devine's Best Friends Again (The Children's Press, £3.95) we remain with the theme of friendship but return to a contemporary Irish world. To begin with, the emphasis is on two girls and their shared love of ponies, but soon this becomes submerged in more serious matters when one of the girls discovers that she has an older sister, given up by their mother for adoption some seventeen years earlier. Devine skilfully depicts the repercussions of such a discovery, being particularly convincing in her suggestion of how existing relationships and friendships assume a new temporary edginess before more warm-hearted feelings can be re-established.
Robert Dunbar is the co-editor, with Gabriel Fitzmaurice, of the poetry anthology Rusty Nails and Astronauts