There’s no mollycoddling, and no shying away from some of the difficulties of the life Kieran and his mum face with the abusive Tony and his Cro-Magnon son Ryan, but equally the domestic horror of that core of their lives is displayed with an unblinking fearlessness that - considering this is written for a younger market - is staggering in how unthreateningly it explores the topics surrounding physical and emotional abuse. Time and again, Slater takes you quietly and calmly by the hand and leads you into the tremendously unpleasant life Kieran must face by simply leaving the emotional response to it entirely to your discretion. When I went up on stage to get my certificate and pencil box, everyone clapped like they knew me. Mum said she’d try and get there but her and Tony had a row and she didn’t want everyone to see her eye. And: There was a prize ceremony for the winners at the Council House. It wasn’t sent away to be marked like everyone else’s work but it was still important. For instance: When my class took their SATs exams in the summer, I had to do a project.
Draw your own conclusions as to Kieran’s precise medical diagnosis, because he sees everything with the same clarity and lack of linguistic filigreeing that will either infuriate you or make you ache inside.
The young man in question is Kieran Woods, who has his own special teacher to help him concentrate in school, is viewed as somewhat “other” by his peers, and perceives the entire world around him with the sort of emotional detachment that bespeaks of a number of labels that are very pleasingly not given. Because, boy, did this book break my heart.
There is a murder, and it is as a result of the efforts of the juvenile protagonist that it gets solved, but this is very much more on the “helping people, young or otherwise, make sense of the world around them” side of things, and while it’s not what I signed up for that’s in no way a bad thing.
Well, this week with Smart (2014) by Kim Slater, we have a story about a young man solving a murder that is most assiduously not about a young man solving a murder. Reviewing two murder mysteries by Tanya Landman last week, I wrote that “I absolutely commend the role literature plays in helping people, young or otherwise, make sense of the world around them, but it’s also nice that sometimes a novel about a couple of 11 year-olds solving a murder can just be about a couple of 11 year-olds solving a murder”.
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