FOUR years ago this month, two 10 year old boys led two year old James Bulger by the hand from a Liverpool shopping centre, brought him to a railway line two and a half miles away - occasionally kicking and hitting him as they went - and battered him to death with kicks and an iron bar. They may very well have sexually assaulted him as well, though that has never been clearly established.
Because it was captured on security cameras, the child's abduction became a television event and therefore made a lasting impact on millions of people around the world. Had the abduction not been filmed, most of us would never have heard of poor James Bulger and people would certainly not be writing books about his death.
Blake Morrison's As If is presented as a book about the case and about why Robert Thompson and Jon Venables could have done what they did to their victim. Morrison is a poet and the author of a prize winning memoir, And When Did You Last See Your Father?
Morrison starts off with a chapter about the Children's Crusade in medieval times, and the connection between that event and the Bulger case is far from clear to this reader.
Along the way we are told about Morrison's childhood, about his weekends home from the trial, which he was covering for a magazine, about a meal in a restaurant - which seems to go on for ages - about his early sexual adventures, about playing doctors and nurses as a child, about his childhood fear of a psychiatric hospital near his home, about his nighttime dreams, about a character he wants to create, about getting his daughter ready for bed, about a contemporary visit to his old mother, and so on and on.
He is a bit like one of these people who take all day to tell you something because they go off on, every tangent that presents itself. Tangents, at least, are usually related to the main event - but what of the seven page description, of his visit to a restaurant, ending with a dream about having sex with a woman other than his wife? Perhaps the fault lies with this reader, too keen for answers to the journalistic questions: who, what, why, where, when, how?
And perhaps the book will give people in the future a fascinating insight into how one man reacted to the Bulger murder in the 1990s. Of course, he reacted with the bafflement and horror which afflicted so many of us when this evil day was revealed to us. And like the rest of us, he has found no answer to the question of why these children did what they did.
Thompson, the child who seems to be generally regarded as the ringleader, came from a home in which savagery to younger children was common, in which three children attempted suicide and in which one asked to be, and was, taken into care. Thompson's mother herself suffered at the hands of a vicious father and she married into a family which was no less vicious.
Venables did not have a violent background but behaved in apparently deranged ways at school, possibly imitating a brother classified as having "special needs" and who was, therefore, given better treatment by the education system. Indeed, both of Venables siblings were in the special needs category and he as the "normal" one, appears to have felt deprived and left out.
Morrison is angry that much of the background information on Thompson was withheld from the court by social workers for their own daft reasons of confidentiality daft because Thompson's history would have, or might have, convinced the jury that he could not be held entirely responsible for what he did.
If Thompson was the ringleader in the killing, it is arguable that the real murderers were those who created a history of viciousness and violence in his family but who are beyond the reach of the law. Morrison is also angry that the two perpetrators were put on trial in an adult court and treated as if they were adults. They were treated, of course, according to the tabloid view of life in which all questions are settled, everything is black or white and there is nothing in between. That view demanded nothing less than that these two children be treated as though they were adults.
IT was not always like this, as is made clear in the best book - for my money - to come out of the Bulger case, The Sleep of Reason, a fine piece of journalism by David James Smith, published in 1994. Smith gives many examples of the murder of children by children in the 18th and 19th centuries (one, near Stockport in 1861, has many similarities to the Bulger killing).
In an age when executions were a form of public entertainment, the approach to these child murderers was, by and large, lenient - more lenient, it would appear, than in this century when sentencing became tougher, possibly because of the existence of a tabloid press and mass communications.
Blake Morrison's book is perhaps best seen as presenting a slice of Blake Morrison's life with particular reference to his experience of the Bulger case. If you want to read about Blake Morrison, this is the book for you. If you want to read about the Bulger case, you will find that here too, but be prepared to skip.