Many
times in my life, I’ve been floored by the alleged differences between books
written for adults and children. The newish ‘genre,’ YA, only adds to my
confusion. Take Julia Jones’s trilogy, which has now mysteriously grown to four
parts, and will stop over my dead body. Here’s my simple test: hold up your
hand if you preferred Treasure Island as an adult, or a child. Ditto the
novels of Arthur Ransome. Or try it in reverse. How many of you loved Agatha
Christie as a child and find her embarrassing as an adult? Right, experiments
over. What I mean is this. Having just finished Jones’s The Lion of Sole Bay, I
am confident that it is about nothing less than love and loneliness, and never
mind the age labels. As were the first three.
Julia’s child characters, let’s say, sprang
originally from her reading of Ransome. His was a world of unthinking wealth
and privilege that many readers can clearly never enter. But for me, as a
child, this class ‘thing’ was never a problem. It was way beyond my life
experience, but it just was. I was
working class, they weren’t. But they did wonderful things and they sailed. I
suppose I imagined John Walker had an accent just like mine. Wow!
Julia’s characters live in a different world
again. Some of them are dirt poor, without the benefit of what our Government
so pathetically and offensively insists on calling ‘hard-working’ parents. Some
of them, indeed, are in care, some of them have fragile mental health, some of
them have mums and dads (or not) who are on the verge of going under. But she
involves them in situations that are the backbone of the Ransome books. They
interact, essentially, with each other. Adults range from the bizarre to the
extraneous, but her children are on their own, and unlike Ransome’s, have extremely subtle needs.
Above all things, they know (although they
don’t articulate it), that they need love. And Ms Jones understands, from the
bottom of her soul, that love is help; and she turns the story screw to make
that need grow greater all the time. Not in a melodramatic way at all, however.
Julia’s stories tend to make me actually cry.
The construct of The Lion of Sole Bay is
extraordinary, and achingly simple. A boy called Luke, whom we know of old, is
left to have a longed-for holiday alone with his father Bill while his extended
and fragmented family go off abroad for their own ‘trip of a lifetime.’ Bill
lives on an old fishing boat, and works in the local boatyard, where on the
night he’s due to meet Luke, he actually meets a little girl called Angela. She
is an emotional outcast, hanging on to a gang of older boys, with whom she
manages to accidentally pull a shored-up boat down on to Bill, which comes very
close to killing him.
The gang run off, but she stays.
Angela
is one of the school’s hopeless ones; friendless, apparently feckless, probably
on the spectrum, a heavily-bullied dimwit, always in trouble, much despised.
She is terrified of the police, but when she knows that they are coming, she cradles
the injured man, and dares to hold his hand.
She has to run at last, of
course. But learns later that Bill, now in intensive care, mistook her for an
angel.
Angela, known derogatorily as Ants because the
other children (the nice, normal ones) like to pull her pants down in the
playground to check for the insects that must be crawling in them because she
is incapable of keeping still, has found her name at last, a name that she has
subconsciously ached for, an identity that can feed her soul. Angel.
Ants and Luke, however, are not the only
damaged ones in this story. Alongside Bill’s boat, for some time, has lain a
Dutch motor barge called Dree Vrouwen (Three Women) manned (irony) by a mad
fascistic politician called Elsevier, her mentally ill follower Hendrike, and Hendrike’s
thirteen year old daughter Helen.
These three women have come across the North
Sea to liberate the figurehead of a Dutch warship involved in the Battle of
Sole Bay, in 1672. It is now the proud sign of a roadside pub at the head of
the creek, but to Elsevier it is the material exemplar of an ancient crime.
Her own planned crime – in her eyes, the
reversal of an ancient wrong – can only be carried out on a certain tide. And
Elsevier, although mad, is a great general (she thinks), and completely
ruthless. She controls Hendrike with herbal potions, fungi, and illegal drugs.
She controls Helen through blackmail (Helen loves her mother and must protect
her). And she carries a gun.
A November the Fifth party will be the
perfect cover for the sea-going heist, and
Luke, Angel, Helen are thus thrown together –
to hate and mistrust each other roundly. Bill lies in hospital, while other
adults are helpless and disbelieving. The North Sea, and the late autumn gales,
are waiting hungrily. I’m telling you, they will be horrible.
As well as the sea, Julia Jones understands
the horror of the human condition, and how utterly cruel life can be. But she
also understands redemption, inside out and backwards. And she is an absolute
master (mistress? Ask Elsevier) of dramatic tension. Some scenes are more
thriller than children’s story, but to categorise this book as either misses
several points.
The children and the adults in this novel, this trilogy-plus,
all need love. Their loneliness is awe-inspiring. With calmness and power,
without a jot of sentimentality, Julia Jones gives it to them.
Call it what you like. For me, its category
is universal.
