Lowly’s Book Blog

Very rarely do I have the time to read a prize winning book. This one arrived with the Vogel Award badge printed on it’s front cover. But yet it is a new release. Does that mean that the manuscript won the award? Very impressive.

 The book is about a dysfunctional family. George works at the local ten-pin bowling alley at a dead end job. His boss has him pegged, and he gets the garbage jobs, literally. His girlfriend has just left him and he is grieving for the relationship while trying to work out what went wrong, and even dreaming of putting things back together. He is clearly suffering from post traumatic stress after walking in on a home invasion. The details are sketchy, but that constant fear has a serious impact on his behaviour when a prowler is seen in the neighbourhood. His brother Matthew is seriously troubled. He was driving when in a moment of youthful silliness there was an accident and his girlfriend/fiancé was killed. Grief and depression overwhelm the young man who can only find solace in a fantasy relationship with Magda Szubanski. George is looking after his older brother while keeping an eye on sad-but-smiling Mum. Enter Stacey, who seems to provide easy comfort, but what does she really want?

 This book thoroughly deserves the award. The writing is surreal, but absorbing. The reader very quickly comes to care about this family. George’s narration is straightforward and sensible, very clearly indicating the responsible young man that he is. Matthew’s narrations are far more symbolic and literary, but still have a warmth and sincerity that holds your attention. I even liked Mum, clearly suffering from a mental illness, but her love for her sons is genuine.

 As is often the case, I do have a problem with the publisher’s marketing. The cover indicated that I could expect a humorous book. Admittedly everyone has a different taste in humour, but I found this book to be very clearly a family drama examining the nature of grief. Thought-provoking and powerful, yes. Funny, no.

This book by first time author Miller is certainly new, fresh and unusual. But I haven’t got a clue about genre. Is it horror, suspense, fantasy or just a good old-fashioned war story. I for one haven’t got a clue.

The setting is modern England. Middle-class teenage boys are disappearing, hundreds of them. It looks like they are all running away, but they are never seen again. What is going on?

The situation is made much more intense by focusing on the disappearance of one boy, Timothy Dashwood. His father is a big wig for an international oil company, and the whole family have spent some time in the Mid East. With these connections, there is the assumption that Dashwood has been kidnapped and all that is to be done is wait for the ransom note. But several other boys from the same school have also disappeared, and no note appears.

The story is told in three parts. First through the eyes of Timothy as he drags himself through the last week of school before the Christmas break. He is the new boy at an exclusive private school and subject to bullying. The reader can clearly sense his desire to escape this torment. Once Timothy disappears the story is taken up by his father as he listens to a series of tape recordings made by the private detective hired to find the boy. These tapes gradually build tension and horror until the detective disappears, and only Dashwood knows how and where. In the final section of the book Dashwood decides to continue the investigation in an effort to get to the bottom of the mystery.

I found this book really quite disjointed and difficult. There were tons of literary references thrown in. Even the title has links to Peter Pan. Did Miller want to demonstrate his education by name dropping? Or was there a point to all these references that I missed. And the second section could easily have been cut in half. After 100 pages, I no longer cared that the tapes were old and faulty, so painstaking descriptions of every hiss and crackle was wasted ink. I was so accustomed to skipping all the italic comments about the quality of the recording that I nearly missed it when the detective disappeared. The third part was packed full of unnecessarily graphic language and sex that had absolutely no place in a story of a father’s search for his son.

But maybe I missed the point. Maybe the whole book is about the tragedy of children caught up in war. Maybe Miller was trying to convince his readers that as long as war exists anywhere in the world, no child is safe.  A worthy theme that is hard to treat with a fresh approach, but a reader shouldn’t be wondering in the end.

This book would have made a great novella, or even a short story, but in its current form it is simply too long and complicated.