Children's Literature: How apt that in the very month that Kate Thompson carries off the Bisto Book of the Year award - this time for The New Policeman - for an unprecedented fourth time, we have the pleasure of a new book from the Yorkshire-born, west of Ireland-based, phenomenally successful children's author.Laurie, this tale's narrator, is 15.
She's one of Kate Thompson's signature chroniclers familiar from her Switchers trilogy, full of the angst that goes with her years, intense, complex, and with an utterly credible smidgen of self-delusion. Her mother works abroad; her father, James McAllister, an absent-minded research scientist, explores means of protecting red squirrels threatened by their more adaptable grey relatives. How could such a topical, apparently virtuous project be linked to evil of such vatic proportions as the story's title suggests?
That's the plot of Thompson's thriller. And it's a good one, full of suspense. But it's only one strand of a complex, exciting story, told with the ease and achievement we expect of the multi-prize-winning author. The story also treats of the imperatives of scientific knowledge and its ethical implications. It would not do to betray the ending, but it reveals with irresistible logic how scientific knowledge is far from value-free, contrary to crude empiricist claims; how the wider application of McAllister's discovery could be global disaster and gross abuse of power.
McAllister's passion for research is no match for the blind instrumentalism of the shadowy project manager, Mr Davenport. Father is more mediocre and inept than he knows. He must have skipped the ethics module on his doctoral programme, such is his carelessness about protocols: he blithely allows youngsters access to his animal samples without a care for how this contaminates it. But the reader will view this more as a flaw of character than plot.
This tale highlights those epiphanic moments when parents' limitations dawn on maturing youngsters, and the way such events can spur adolescents to stake their claim on the universe they inhabit. Thompson poignantly contrasts how painstakingly Laurie, her father's research assistant, builds a trusting relationship with the squirrels she handles, while her childish faith in her father is sorely tried. Thrown back on her own resources as she inches towards adulthood, she struggles to make sense of a taut situation. She is obliged to confront her father's complicity in a project whose application will wreak certain havoc.
As narrator, Laurie conveys more than she realises. We recognise not only McAllister's inadequacies but also marital tension. The ambient anxieties of troubled times are intensified by and woven with personal woes.
It might seem that the introduction into this realistic tale of a challenging visionary element, the prophetic motif of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse (the fourth, awaiting its rider, will lead us to extinction), would detract from its plausibility. Far from it. So highly charged is the tale's atmosphere that it embodies emotional truth, heightened further by centuries of import.
It's in keeping with the times that Laurie and companions find the key to the vision not in church or school, but in an internet search. Laurie's flawless exegetical skills perhaps place greater strain on credibility than the compelling biblical manifestation of impending disaster.
This is another triumph for Thompson, who skilfully probes how an optimism adequate to youth can co-exist with an apocalyptic awareness.
Mary Shine Thompson is research co-ordinator and lecturer at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra. Her recent publications include Treasure Islands: Studies in Children's Literature, co-ed Celia Keenan (Four Courts) and The Selected Plays of Austin Clarke (Colin Smythe)
The Fourth Horseman by Kate Thompson The Bodley Head, 250 pp. £10.99