Teenage Fiction: Niall MacMonagle on the latest books from Oisín McGann, Meg Rosoff, Helen Dunmore, Chris Lynch , Margaret Mahy and Anne Fine
In Somerset Maugham's 1915 novel, Of Human Bondage, 16-year-old Sally "goes about her business indifferent to wars, revolutions, and cataclysms". For many Global Village teenagers, however, indifference is not an option and the novels reviewed here tackle big themes, the Bigger Picture. That said, they also explore closer-to-home, parent-teenage relationships.
Small-Minded Giants by Oisín McGann (Doubleday £10.99) is my kind of sci-fi: more character and plot than whizzing gizmos. Welcome to the 24th century and to Ash Harbour city, built inside a hollowed-out mountain, in the South Pacific, "its top roofed with a massive dome to keep out the ferocious elements".
The setting is brilliantly realised. Sinister, Orwellian touches - heating quotas, blackouts, pedal stations, torture, food supplements and catastrophic climate change - are timely reminders of where we might be heading. The private simulation chamber is a mind- and eye-opener and the Dark-Day Fatalists allow McGann examine religion's role in a mechanised, violent, dehumanised world. Sixteen-year old Sol's father disappears and the unravelling of that mystery becomes a compelling, compulsive, atmospheric story. Sol and Cleo take on the system and survive. For those aged 14 and upwards, it's somewhere between Anthony Horowitz and Patrick Cave. The movie is already rolling in my head.
Naturally, great expectations greet Meg Rosoff's Just In Case (Penguin, £10.99 ); her sparky, original The Way I Live Now sold 200,000 copies. For David/Justin Case the "boundary between reality and fantasy wobbled dangerously". As in all really good writing, how it's told matters more than the tale itself. But here everything works: the storyline is fresh, daft, surreal, different. Set in Luton, of all places, there's an imaginary dog, a brainy baby brother, the "fluorescent lime and sparkly" seductress Agnes, and all the while the day-to-day, school and sport, anchor the narrative in a world that 15-year-olds will recognise. Justin's erotic musings and the "sexual buzz" of boy meets girls certainly buzz. Interiority is Rosoff's territory, doomed youth her speciality. "That bastard Fate" speaks. Disasters happen. Justin is struck down. That it ends "happily" and "sadly ever after" and "sometimes at the same time" is a plus. This grown-up book for those growing up is an even better, more original novel than her first - and that's saying something.
The Tide Knot by Helen Dunmore (HarperCollins, £12.99), a welcome sequel to her prize-winner Ingo, also mixes the other-worldly and the realistic.
Sapphire's "double blood" - Mer and human - means she can breathe air and water. Though recognisably regular teenagers , Sapphy and her brother Conor connect with the underwater world. Dunmore writes beautifully of Cornwall, sea mysteries and dolphins; she cocks a snook at humans who pour Tarmac on the earth "to stop it breathing" and when a tidal surge causes havoc, environmental concerns come to the fore. The magic-making Granny, a sick dog, Sapphy's reunion with her father and the climactic end all make for another winner. Like the ocean itself, this book is deep and strange and marvellous.
Keir, in Chris Lynch's Inexcusable (Bloomsbury £6.99 ), is your polite, well-meaning, all-American guy. Or he thinks he is. A football accident, anti-social behaviour, frat parties, the prom dance, what Jane Austen calls "the tyrannic influence of youth on youth", recreational drugs and alcohol are all part of Keir's life. When beautiful Gigi, becomes his Prom date, Keir's journey - "famous, then infamous, then notorious" - begins.
"It really is terrible when people let you down" says Gigi but when Keir thinks it "inexcusable" we recognise trouble. Keir knows the moment when "a full half of me went dark and cold".
Keir's voice, the novel's structure and Lynch's descriptions are all superb: "it was early morning in that unspeakable great gap in between night people giving it up and the day people taking it over, in that luscious pink-orange spring morning light".
His sister Fran's perspective - "The way you make things look is not the way they really are" - highlights something crucial. Inexcusable explores loneliness, popularity, self-image and does complex adolescence justice; the reader continually questions, assesses, learns, even sympathises. Sexual assault is despicable and Lynch never condones but we see how a "fine and lucky guy" gets it terribly wrong. Every 16-year-old plus should read it. It's streets ahead of most teenage fiction.
Margaret Mahy's world in Maddigan's Fantasia (Faber £12.99) is fantastic. After The Destruction [ "when the world growled like a mad dog, and tore itself to pieces"], Chaos comes, then the Re-making and this post-apocalyptic tale features Garland, red-headed, almost-13 and an acrobat in her father's circus. But Road Rats kill Garland's father and the circus people struggle to bring a solar converter to Solis.
Garland has no time for "rubbishy, time-travelling stories" but when Timon and Eden ride "a time pulse and travelled back" and "come from somewhere on ahead of you", the adventures that follow include underground passages, "dissolving", and the Nennog - a monster who "wants to eat the whole world". There's no denying Mahy's eager play on language or her ability and determination to create a busy adventure but the Diary device is strained and the story, at times, too drawn out. A book more engaging perhaps for the children's literature conference fraternity than for the child thrown on the sofa looking for a good read.
In The Road of Bones (Doubleday £10.99), Anne Fine has written a grim and gripping and necessary story of how brute begets brutish. We're in a dictatorial state, "all the churches had been sacked and locked" and "no one roamed now"; "eyes down" and "ears closed" mean survival.
Forced to leave school at 12, Yuri speaks his mind only to endure the "freezing drudgery" of a labour camp. Eventual escape and narrow misses turn the pages but bitter, ironic tones, crisp writing and Yuri's voice - his resilience and disheartening transformation - are the novel's real strengths.
Niall MacMonagle teaches English at Wesley College, Dublin
