Fiction: Out of Breath By Julie Myerson Jonathan Cape, 296pp. £12.99Much has been written in recent years about the rise of "crossover" fiction, those rare novels that capture the imaginations of adults and teenagers alike - the phenomenally successful The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Timeand Meg Rosoff's How I Live Nowbeing two examples of the genre at its best.
It's not just their young adult narrators who make these books so appealing to both readerships - although that obviously helps - it's also their authors' skill in telling the stories convincingly enough to ring true to teenagers, but with enough universality and emotional insight to make them resonate with adults. Now joining the ranks of this burgeoning market is respected writer Julie Myerson, whose latest novel, Out of Breath, tells the story of Flynn, a 13-year-old girl who embarks on an unsettling, life-changing journey after a mysterious boy appears at the end of her garden.
The connection between Flynn and Alex is instant, and the moment of their encounter has that slightly uncanny quality that readers of Myerson's previous works will recognise. Alex is one of three runaways whom Flynn and her brother Sam (a superb portrait of troubled teenage male in all his surliness and self-absorption) soon join on a dreamlike escape through the English summertime countryside. The others are Mouse, a manic and disturbed six-year-old with a penchant for setting things alight, and beautiful, enigmatic Dianam who has just given birth to a baby, Joey, a day earlier.
What these three are fleeing from isn't made clear; Myerson is a master of suggestion and builds up the suspense layer by layer, hinting at the dark episodes which have driven them here. Chief among these is "the man" pursuing them, a dread-inducing, faceless character identified only by the cloying smell of the patchouli he wears (a brilliant device; in Myerson's hands the smell - oily and sickly sweet - becomes a queasy manifestation of corruption).
Venturing deeper into the deserted countryside and further away from any sort of reality, the group finally comes across an abandoned cottage which seems to offer them everything they've been looking for: shelter, food and a hiding place. But as in Hansel and Gretel (the parallels with which Flynn herself can see), there is something menacing about the house in the woods; a feeling of being watched and controlled by an outside force. Perception, memory and the very building start to shift, heightening the sense of unreality and drawing the children, and the reader, farther into a sinister twilight zone.
But this is not a fairy tale, and the monsters aren't all of the supernatural kind: the realities of the adult world are just as distressing to Flynn and her companions as any ghoul, be it parents fighting - "I hated the shouting (Dad) and the crying (Mum), but what I hated most were the gaps in between . . . where even if you shut your eyes and pushed your face into the pillow, the pictures in your head just kept on coming" - or the horror of child abuse. Told in the voice of a 13-year-old, these nightmares - and indeed many of the novel's events - are revealed to the reader in spare, matter-of-fact dialogue. While this is to Myerson's credit in terms of authenticity, at times it also runs the risk of becoming plodding, echoing the worst kind of circular, inconclusive teenage conversation. Even so, Flynn is a hard character to dislike; her descriptions of classic rites of passage - first kiss, first twinges of self-consciousness around boys - are honest in their awkwardness, and Myerson isn't afraid to tackle the thorny issue of teenage sexuality, but does so without heavy-handedness or judgment. And, as always, she excels at creating an almost palpable atmosphere, with the "boiling yellow heat" of a summer afternoon coming right off the page.
Like its characters, Out of Breath inhabits a strange limbo between two worlds - it is teenage in subject; adult in theme - and like them it is not without its flaws; but then again, striking out into new territory, fictional and otherwise, always makes more demands than staying in the same safe place.
Catherine Heaney is a contributing editor to The Gloss magazine