The Young Accomplice by Benjamin Wood: the ‘saviour story’ paradigm interrogated

About halfway through Benjamin Wood’s fourth novel, The Young Accomplice, a character laments not having designed her bedroom to better suit her needs. “[W]hen she’d made the plans to renovate her bedroom, back in August, she hadn’t known what would be needed. Instead, she’d had a vision of a dressing table with a nice round mirror and a green felt pad to put her hairbrush on.”

The lives we design versus the lives we live is a central dichotomy in the book, which tells of two siblings, just released from borstal and assigned to take up residence and apprenticeship with a couple in the English countryside. It’s the 1950s and reverberations of the war linger (one character lost an arm on duty), but life must go on. The couple’s project is a Utopian one: they wish to replenish their farmland so it can provide subsistence as they run their architecture practice/apprenticeship. Will the siblings, and the couple, succeed in improving their lives by design, or will their foundations prove too unstable?

Magwitch-like criminals

The Young Accomplice is not a Dickensian tale of salvation via social mobility, though it riffs on the idea (and we encounter Magwitch-like criminals at large in the countryside). Rather, it subtly interrogates the “saviour story” paradigm, and from early on, the flaws associated with benevolent gestures are flagged — “grand gestures of charity … were only meant to glorify the giver”, Arthur Mayhood observes. The book is less concerned with the idea of betterment than with examining the effects a person can have on another, for good or for bad, and the factors that might facilitate, or impede, a fully rounded life.

With deceptive ease, the book weaves elements of crime, mystery, love story and coming of age. Shifts in perspective from one character to the next mean the plot can splinter in many directions, offering alternate outcomes to lives broadly similar. Though the momentum is sometimes interrupted by passages describing characters’ pasts, the reading experience is nonetheless enjoyable.

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Wood’s natural observational style (Arthur’s realisation, as he looks at a man in the pub, that “every filling in that mouth — and likely everybody else’s in the building — had a faint connection to his wife”, whose father was a dentist, is one example), combined with his sensibility for the vocabulary and syntax of the time (the prose never feels stilted) make The Young Accomplice a well-wrought novel whose pleasure is in each careful scene, moment and sentence.