Teenage Fiction: It says a great deal for the continuing significance of Norse myth and legend that they should serve, to varying degrees, as an important reference point for the young adult novels under review here.
Characterised by elemental passions, raw emotions, violent power struggles and, often, by generational conflicts, these ancient Scandinavian stories provide an appropriate range of metaphors for the adolescent years themselves, especially when, as happens in two of these novels, the settings are futuristic and dystopian. So-called contemporary realism in young adult fiction may have the appeal of shock and controversy but it frequently loses out on symbolic and literary resonance.
No such accusation can be made of Melvin Burgess's Bloodsong, a novel which succeeds wonderfully in moving from its Norse saga origins to the waste and desolate landscape of an unspecified future. At its centre is the story of Sigurd, the teenage hero apparently endowed with all the blessings - "power, wealth, strength, youth" - who has to reconcile the ownership and exercise of these gifts with his own vision for the country which, following the inevitable period of conflict, he aspires to unite. Sigurd's gradual understanding of how the idealism of youth has to be tempered by experience in "the slippery, back-stabbing world of politics" is a painful prelude to the book's final page, where one simple sentence such as "he was 18 years old" assumes a poignancy well beyond its factual meaning.
Our notions of heroism, like Sigurd's notions themselves, are placed beside those of humanity; the fickleness of our admiration is tellingly juxtaposed with rejection and betrayal. Burgess's novel, dark and tragic as it frequently is, nevertheless pulses with the intensity of lives richly lived and experiences richly recaptured. While these lives and experiences occasionally involve consideration of such matters as violence, sexuality and an appropriate register in which to record them, Burgess here manages to make them an integral part of his narrative rather than merely titillating accessories.
The destiny of the Sigurd who appears in Geraldine McCaughrean's novel is inextricably bound with the story of Sym, more formally known as Symone. Both are contemporary teenagers on an expedition to Antarctica. While Sigurd is ostensibly on the trip as an ordinary tourist, Sym has deeper reasons. Her father has just died and, simultaneously with dealing with the traumatic consequences of bereavement, she is coping with her obsession with the life and death of Captain "Titus" Oates, the Polar explorer. Also in the party is Sym's Uncle Victor, possessor of "the Great Secret" of Antarctica, which would seem to point to "a cavity in the Antarctic wilderness . . . where the lost and dying find succour, down in the deep and dark places". McCaughrean's skilful blending of Sym's first-person narrative and Oates's memoirs gives her novel a beautifully maintained structural strength. It also allows for Symone's consideration of her own "deep and dark places" and of the terrain which her explorer hero had once, in her imagination, shared with her. Indeed, it is possible to interpret this richly satisfying novel as being primarily concerned with the imagination and its transforming potential. The mind, as the novel's Miltonic epigraph recalls for us, "is its own place".
The first novel in a projected trilogy of futuristic fictions, Susan Price's Odin's Voice, as its title implies, impels us forcibly to return to its ancient, mythic origins. In this particular futuristic vision, the principal societal development has been the division of the population into its slaves (the "bonders") and its privileged (the "freeborn"). Kylie, one of the former of these, finds herself caught up in a complex sequence of events by which she ultimately becomes the "Odin's voice" of the title. In this role she is brought into close contact, and subsequently collaboration, with the "freeborn" Affroditey (sic), whose social standing, following her father's suicide, has undergone a transformation as dramatic as Kylie's.
As a portrait of a particular "brave new world", Price's novel is an ambitious mixture of the political, the social and the religious, with many of these themes no doubt awaiting further development in subsequent volumes. As it stands, a careful reading is required if its subtleties are to be fully grasped.
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children's books and reading
Bloodsong By Melvin Burgess Andersen Press, 322pp. £12.99. The White Darkness By Geraldine McCaughrean Oxford, 264pp. £12.99. Odin's Voice By Susan Price Simon & Schuster, 313pp. £12.99