Teenagers: Conflict between parent and child triggers much of the new fiction, writes Robert Dunbar
Writing recently in these pages about the findings of The Irish Times/TNS mrbi Youth Poll, Maureen Gaffney remarked: "All of the evidence shows that parents remain crucial in young people's lives, as long as they stay emotionally close. This closeness and engagement is particularly important for vulnerable young people."
These two sentences, though commenting on a poll involving Irish adolescents, clearly have much wider application and could easily serve as an epigraph for a substantial portion of the novels currently being published for young adult readers.
In much of this fiction it is the nature of the relationship (or non-relationship) between parent and child which triggers off the narrative: at the heart of many plots is the conflict between the young who wish to break free and the old who have difficulty in letting go.
While such a theme often results in cliché and melodrama, the gifted writer is capable of addressing it in terms which are frequently genuinely fresh and revealing. Sally Prue's Ryland's Footsteps is a particularly successful example of what can be achieved when a strictly realistic mode is abandoned in favour of something more like a fable, though in this case a fable full of high adventure.
Here, the main focus is on Rye, a young teenager, whose father, Ryland, is the newly appointed governor of an island colony. As the title implies, it is Ryland's intention that the son, in the formation of his values and attitudes, will unquestioningly endorse his father's outlook, but Rye's encounter with two other young people, from very different parentages, is to increase his innate scepticism about the paternal motives. Numerous loyalties are put to the test and reconciliation is hard-won.
A quest for reconciliation lies also at the centre of Carolyn Coman's Many Stones, explored principally through a narrative examining the relationship between Berry, the teenage heroine, and her father. They travel from their native US to South Africa on a trip which, as Berry expresses it, is "metaphor city".
The journey is primarily undertaken to allow father and daughter to attend a memorial service for Berry's older sister, earlier murdered in Cape Town. It becomes also, however, the opportunity for Berry to exorcise her grief and anger at the murder, to reconsider her perception of her father's responses and to place her own traumas against the political background of a post-apartheid South Africa undergoing its own search for new directions. Coman's impressive and ambitious novel is beautifully balanced in its juxtapositions, at their various levels, of former prejudices and possible future realignments.
When we leave Tom, the hero of James Riordan's The Cello, he is 20 years of age and performing the Beatles' Yesterday as an encore at his concert début: the future looks reasonably secure. His own "yesterday", however, has been scarred by the prejudices of those schoolmates who have seized on his musicianship and, more hurtfully, on his developing gay sexuality as an excuse for verbal and physical aggression. It is here that his mother, in her acceptance and understanding of her son's vulnerabilities, added to her belief in his potential as a human being and musician, draws on what Gaffney refers to as emotional closeness to ensure Tom's progress towards self-fulfilment. This is a novel which, refreshingly, celebrates parental and adolescent determination to stand up to ignorance and bigotry.
While the relationship between mother and son plays a significant role also in Trevor J. Colgan's The Stretford Enders: Square One, it is more as a supportive background dimension than at the forefront.
Supportive, that is, of teenager Luke Farrell, as he attempts to pursue a footballing career in the face of apparently insurmountable obstacles: a broken leg, a fellow teenager's suicide, a girlfriend's departure for England, an onset of depression characterised by binge eating. But the novel's most intriguing aspect by far is Luke's relationship with Peter, a former enemy and brother of the boy who has committed suicide. Peter's suggestion that he should be the one to restore Luke to mental and physical health results in some fascinating insights into the psychological complexities of male bonding. Colgan catches quite brilliantly (and humorously) the adolescent embarrassment of those moments when the heterosexual male naked body feels exposed, "especially under the spotlight of male eyes". The south Dublin setting, including some poignant scenes in Deansgrange cemetery, will be particularly resonant for Irish readers.
The events in Julie Bertagna's The Opposite of Chocolate take place in the symbolically named Hungry, an affluent suburb in an anonymous (Scottish?) city. Here lives Sapphire, 14 years of age and pregnant, a condition which leads to violent verbal exchanges between her and her parents - who do not themselves agree on the matter - as to whether or not she should have an abortion.
Sapphire's dilemma is tellingly placed within another narrative of teenage confusion, in which a young man is released from his particular form of parental treatment only by way of arson attacks on local properties. Bertagna's novel searingly depicts friction between parent and adolescent at its darkest and most uncompromising. Its overall stance is to argue for the right of the young to take control of their destinies and to survive as best as they can "until the in-between years of teen boredom" end.
For that, as Sapphire and her friends realise, is when their real lives will begin.
Robert Dunbar is head of English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Rathmines, Dublin
Ryland's Footsteps. By Sally Prue, Oxford, £6.99
Many Stones. By Carolyn Coman, Young Picador, £8.99
The Cello. By James Riordan, Oxford, £6.99
The Stretford Enders: Square One. By Trevor J. Colgan, Red Fox, £4.99
The Opposite of Chocolate. By Julie Bertagna, Young Picador, £9.99