Now and then a quiet novel creeps up on one. In the midst of all those tawdry covers, hyperbole-boosted blurbs, spiralling advances, seriously challenged, door-stop tomes, one comes across a smaller, almost deferential book that one casually dips into, pauses for reflection, then stays to gulp like someone satiated by excess finding relief in the pungency of an ice-cold sorbet. Such a modest apotheosis was engendered in me by Suzanne Berne's A Crime in the Neighbourhood. Unheralded amidst a batch of luridly clamouring thrillers, it is a small book, easy to handle. I read a few pages, was captivated, then suddenly found myself on the last page, modern ancient mariner-like, sadder and a wiser. Nothing like this has happened to me since I was ambushed, many years ago, by Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking- bird. This story too is told by a pre-pubescent girl, but it is a sadder tale with no upbeat ending, and the Boo Radley figure does not come out to effect a rescue, but instead is stained indelibly by a vengeance brought about by the yearnings of loss and hurt.
Marsha is the 10-year-old narrator who lives in a suburb of Washington DC with her mother and father, and the twins Julie and Steven. Soon after the story opens, Marsha's father decamps with her Aunt Ada, leaving a void in Marsha's life that is never filled.
Highly imaginative and intense, the young girl takes to spying on her neighbourhood, and writing down in a notebook all she sees through her toy plastic binoculars. When a young boy is attacked and brutally killed behind the local mall, a malaise settles on what had been a quiet and orderly place. Marsha, her own life thrown out of synch by her father's betrayal and her mother's eccentric behaviour, decides that their shy and withdrawn neighbour, Mr Green, may well have been the perpetrator of the murder, and, with the help of a spiteful, eight-year-old neighbour, seeks to incriminate him. Events soon spiral out of control and a kind of distanced tragedy ensues. A Crime in the Neighbourhood is suffused by the poetry of the humdrum, the chaff of life made iridescent by the manner in which it is back-lit. A seagull drifts across a blue sky; a card table is heaped with paper plates, plastic forks and knives, plastic-wrapped packages of hot dogs and hamburgers, buns, bottles of coke, cartons of ice cream; a woman appears naked, a towel wrapped round her head; four sisters lie on a bed smoking and painting one another's toenails; and a little girl with a broken ankle sits on her porch and plays a deadly game.
The writing is deceptively ordinary in its parts, yet majestic in its cumulative import. At the heart of this book is an attempt to quantify and make sense of the hurt hatched in children when the adults they look to for love and protection betray them by breaking apart and fading out of their lives. The three children here handle it differently: the twins adopt the brittle personas of arch-aristocratic English fops, Felicia and Rodney, and play-act away their hurt, while the younger Marsha, bewildered and forlorn, finds cause to accuse the surrogate father-figure, Mr Green, of unimaginable evil.
Such big themes, yet handled so effortlessly. A caress, rather than a slap, a muted nod towards nuance and subtlety, rather than the brashness of over-explanation. Ms Berne trades in the delicacy of suggestion, and her work is all the more affecting because of it. I look forward to reading her again.
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic
