Teenage fiction: While numerous children's novelists have drawn on the richness of Irish myth, legend and folklore as inspiration for their fictions, few have managed to do so with the skill, wit and mischief which characterise Kate Thompson's The New Policeman.
Thompson, who just a few weeks ago became the first author to have won the overall Bisto Award three times when Annan Water took the 2005 prize, has produced in this latest work a novel which, without straining for political or sociological parallels, focuses above all on the continuity which underlies ancient and contemporary experience, transcending specific notions of personality, place and time. Significant as all three of these have been in Thompson's earlier narratives, her engagement on this occasion is pre-eminently with time and its role (sometimes humorous, sometimes very serious) in directing the interplay between past and present, fantasy and reality.
The present reality of the novel has its setting in Kinvara, Co Galway, where 15-year-old JJ Liddy, one of a family of traditional fiddlers, finds himself increasingly embroiled in that family's "hidden territories". In the darker of these domains lurks an allegation that JJ's great-grandfather may have been a murderer; it is the teenager's determination to establish the truth or otherwise of this claim that gives the novel its central narrative strand. Simultaneously, JJ has taken it upon himself to "buy", by way of a birthday present, some "time" for his mother, who, in common with many Kinvara residents, finds there is never enough of it around for the demands of a busy life.
The pursuit of both these goals takes JJ from present reality to fantasy past in the form of a visit to Tír na nÓg. Thompson's account of the boy's entry to this other world, her vision of its literal and metaphorical proximity to the Kinvara he has just left and the role she accords in JJ's discoveries to the town's "new policeman" provide a sequence of unexpected and diverting developments. And, scattered throughout the novel, by way of unifying framework, are some 50 dance tunes, the Liddy repertoire across the generations.
Readers of 12 and upwards should find plenty to entertain and stimulate in this elegantly paced and cleverly structured novel.
The uncompromising toughness of style and theme which typified Matt Whyman's highly praised 2004 young adult novel, Boy Kills Man, is again a key feature in his new book, The Wild. In essence, this is a story of survival, in which we trace the hazardous journey undertaken by 16-year-old Alexi and his 9-year-old brother, Mishi, as they abandon their native Kazakhstan and make their way to Moscow. "We know how to survive in a hostile world," Alexi assures Mishi at one point; it is a declaration which will be rigorously tested as the brothers' plight (and, especially, Mishi's illness) worsen by the hour.
The evidence of a "hostile world" is first apparent in Whyman's depiction of the bleak, unyielding terrain - "this dead and empty land" as their widowed father expresses it - from which the brothers attempt to wrest some sort of living by salvaging and subsequently selling rocket parts from a nearby cosmodrome. Their hardships here give way, on their Moscow journey, to inhospitable weather, hunger, feral dogs and fierce encounters with rivals. The boys' love and pride, portrayed poignantly but not sentimentally by Whyman, sustains them until - very nearly - the end: their youthful heroism more than compensates for the "wildness" (human, environmental and political) which everywhere surrounds them.
Familiar to many adult readers as the author of such best-sellers as Bravo Two Zero and Immediate Action, Andy McNab has now turned his attention to a younger readership. For plot material, however, he is still very much indebted to his SAS years, the events centred on 17-year-old Danny Watts. Turned down for a long-coveted career in the army, Danny learns that the reason for his rejection has to do with his SAS grandfather, Fergus Watts, guilty of acts of treachery against his former regiment and colleagues. Although allegedly dead, Fergus, it turns out, is still alive and back (from Colombia, scene of his infamy) in England.
It now becomes Danny's determined intention to find Fergus and hand him over to the British authorities. In the process of the hunt there are some moments of high tension and excitement, particularly where these involve unpredictable twists of plot and unexpected changes of allegiance. In general, though, the novel is weakened by a lack of convincing psychological detail, an over-fondness for cliches and by an obsession with organisational acronyms, not all of them explained in the "glossary" with which the book opens.
Robert Dunbar is head of English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin