Fiction: Jess, or Jessamy, depending on her mother's level of exasperation at any given time, is imaginative and deeply troubled. Given to hiding in the linen closet of her parents' London home, Jess, the central character of The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi's exuberantly confident and showy debut, is the daughter of a tense Nigerian mother and a curiously passive English father. The family live within the daily hell of the little girl's extreme mood swings.
Mother is Sarah, a youngish woman caught between her present life as a writer in England and that of her African heritage. Her personality is defined by defiance and guilt. It is she who decides on a visit home to Nigeria, where life for her family is dominated by the complex presence of her widower father. Yet, whereas Sarah appears to want to provide her child with a sense of both cultures, the little girl is suffering from being neither one thing nor the other.
Added to this is Jess's apparent history of disruptive screaming fits at school. All of this acquires a far more sinister dimension when, shortly before returning to England after a month-long holiday in Nigeria, Jess meets Tilly, a confident, if furtive, outsider who arrives from nowhere and, for Jess, personifies her own dilemma.
The Icarus Girl was published with enormous fanfare, partly no doubt because it was written while its author, now a university student at Cambridge, was still at school studying for her A levels.
In the novel, Oyeyemi, who was born in Nigeria in 1984 and moved to London at the age of four, takes the familiar theme of cultural alienation and runs with it a bit too wildly. Such is the abandon at work here, Oyeyemi somehow never quite manages to be fully convincing.
Little is revealed about the marriage of Jess's parents. They are deliberately sketched, not as individuals, but only in the roles of bewildered parents. Early in the narrative, Sarah admits she can no longer deal with her daughter. The couple invariably clash over the best method of handling the child. Daniel proves a lovingly ineffectual father. The increasingly desperate Sarah believes in discipline to the point of ordering Jess to stand in a room, her punishment is original - the child must consider her sins while balancing tins of pineapples on her upturned palms.
Meanwhile, Tilly develops into more than a mystery friend invented by a lonely, unhappy child. She follows Jess back to England and quickly becomes the buddy from hell. Jess's behaviour becomes even more erratic. Mr Heinz, the head teacher, and something of a saint with a flair for understatement, attempts to solve the problem.
"I wanted to ask you - are you happy in your new class? I mean, obviously, I know that sometimes it all gets a little bit stressful and you, you know, erm, vent your feelings and so on, but in general is it all right there?" This to a pupil who "had calculated one weekend that on average she had at least one serious tantrum in school per week". Such looseness is typical of this novel.
Even before the arrival of Tilly, who may or may not exist beyond Jess's imagination, the child had problems. As expected, a dead twin is introduced into the narrative. Cultures have different ways of dealing with death, and the vital, belated recognition of the dead twin takes over.
Late in the story, after the family has returned to Nigeria to celebrate Jess's impending ninth birthday, Jess asks her grandfather why she had never been told about her sister. "We don't do things that way, Wuraola [ pet name]. When someone dies, it's a special thing, almost secret. If someone dies badly or too young we say their enemy has died. There is no way to say these things directly in English. It is a bad thing for you to have lost your sister. She's half yourself."
The Icarus Girl, for all its confidence and graphic violence as Tilly and/or Jess battle for revenge and inflict pain, lacks literary sophistication and often emerges as routine magic realism. It is no Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Instead it reads as pre-teen, or possibly teen fiction.
Marketing issues should not impinge on textual criticism, yet this is a book that could easily be pitched at critically demanding 10-year-olds who will also detect the narrative weaknesses. The psychiatric sessions Jess is eventually taken to, where she meets up with the doctor's daughter, are too casually described to be taken seriously, while the trail of destruction is merely described, not confronted.
It is very much a young person's book, written by a young person, in possession of lightness of tone but dependent on predictable special effects. There is insufficient technical maturity at work, particularly in the characterisation, to achieve the subtle shifts that could have elevated what is, at best, a jauntily likeable book, towards being a convincing, even moving work about contrasting cultures and the relevance of tradition.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Icarus Girl. By Helen Oyeyemi, Bloomsbury, 302pp. £16.99