This is another book reviewed in Planet - and I found it really powerful, I was caught up in it and found its narrative thrust made it hard to put down.
It is told through the voices of 3 childhood friends from a gang of 4, who are returning to the spot where the tragedy that broke up that gang occurred years before. They also slip between their adult voices and childhood voices that they had left behind that day. Sometimes the jump between multiple narrators can be clunky but here the strength of character of the different voices carries you from one to another seamlessly. While it quickly becomes fairly clear what must happened that fateful day there is still a huge sense of suspense about it until the 3 comes at last both physically and emotionally to the site of where it happened.
There is much made of the fact that their childhood home was an island, and the definite boundaries that placed around their existence - however I think that almost all childhoods are lived on a metaphorical island. But maybe what the physical island did is force a rupture in the linear growth of the metaphorical island, as child our world is the home, then the street, then school, then the estate or town - the physical island mean that there came a point when to grow to the next level you had to leave the island altogether or remain trapped in the limiting geography of childhood, we could think of the writing of Laurie Lee where the boundary of "the valley" played the same role.
As the 3 return to face the event they have separately been on the run from we find that there are a host of other demons that they must face which are equal to the central event if not in fact greater than it. Each one in turn faces some place that prompts a violent reaction - they have to strike out in order assert themselves over an event/a person who had got the better of them as a child. As someone who moved a few times as a child, and even more so as a young adult, I got into the habit of leaving the unfinished business behind - which is ok as long as you never go back. I remember a trip back to Barnet after an interval of years where as each stop on the Northern Line past the sense of dread built and built, when we had moved from Barnet I had encountered a sense of liberation but I now found that the freedom was a phantom. What is needed it to look the past in the eye and then move on - if you simply run away you don't in fact get anywhere.
On a happier note, I started reading this book flying back from Aberdeen and got to the following quote as we were passing over Durham, where I will be going for a reunion in a month or so time, which made the truth of it really strike home:
"It's funny, but once you've known someone for ages, like really ages, the hello bit's pointless. If you've spent that much time together, the other time you've not spent together doesn't seem to count. I mean, the second you meet it's like it doesn't exist, like it didn't happen. And when you try to describe it it's as if you telling a story about someone else."
In the context of the book these words are spoken with a touch of ambivalence, but when this happens with friends from Durham (or Student Cross or lots of other places) for me it is a source of joy that the separation can melt away so easily and you are back united in as close a bond as you ever had.
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