Sex, drugs and violence

A book about a teenage suicide bomber has become a surprise bestseller. This brings out how books for the young tackle the darker aspects of present-day life. Boyd Tonkin reports

Novel Trend: Malorie Blackman’s Checkmate is topping sales charts.

A celebrated children’s author is galloping up the charts with a novel that depicts the drift of a dispossessed teenager who comes from a racial underclass into violent protest and, finally, into terrorism. The heroine ends up agreeing to become a suicide bomber, and in the process murders a double-dealing politician. "And not just my intended victim," she gloats as she picks up a carrier bag stuffed with plastic explosives. "Anyone around us would get more than they bargained for." For this 15-year-old avenger, "We were at war. All wars carried casualties." Should parents and teachers feel concerned? Only, I would suggest, if children refuse to read the book.

Malorie Blackman was one of only two African-descended writers to feature in the BBC’s Big Read selection of its viewers’ 100 favourite novels. (The other, stretching a point, was the mixed-race creator of The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas.) In 2001, Blackman began a series of novels about the "Noughts and Crosses": two groups, one dark and dominant (the Crosses), the other fair and oppressed (the Noughts). They co-exist, and conflict, in a fictitious segregated society that shrewdly combines elements of apartheid-era South Africa with the divided West Asia and the smouldering tensions of contemporary Britain. Both Noughts and Crosses and Knife Edge, its follow-up, sold well and won awards. Now Checkmate — the new novel — is running second in the children books’ sales charts to the sixth instalment of Harry Potter, while the other titles gain a second wind.

Checkmate may involve the mental preparations of a would-be bomber, but it dwells far more on redemption than destruction. At the novel’s climax, the 15-year-old wannabe assassin, Callie Rose, feels while gripping her deadly burden as if "I held death in my hands. It was strange feeling. A kind of calm, deliberate disquiet." Yet the book ends if not in happiness then at least in hope. "That’s what I’m telling readers," Blackman told The Independent in a recent interview about the Noughts and Crosses series. "There is always that chance to change. Nothing is predestined." Blackman’s other episodes hardly pulled their punches either: the books detail the psychological and social havoc wrought by division and prejudice. Terrorist acts occur and in all the novels the fantasy scenario allows for an exploration of the murderous bitterness that exclusion can cause — without the straitjacket imposed by current events.

As in much of the best children’s fiction, Blackman rotates the conflicts and obsessions of the contemporary world — in this case, about race, immigration and desperate youth — into a uniquely fictional dimension. She allows readers both to identify and to reflect, employing warm hearts and cool heads alike.

As so often in media stories about young people’s fiction, the headline-grabbing topic only starts to make sense in a broader context. The sex, the drugs, or the graphic violence in this field may crop up with a frequency that would have shocked the guardians of children’s culture even 20 years ago. But they hardly ever flourish in isolation. The finest writers for children deal in cause and consequence. They invariably show the origins and the outcome of extreme events. In contrast, plenty of "adult" genre fiction delivers merely sensations without sources.

Fiction for young readers has certainly grown tougher and bolder over the past couple of decades, breaking taboos and pushing boundaries with a courage and confidence it never had before. Setting the tone, the Potter sequence itself has darkened appreciably with each volume, as the playtime fun has faded and motifs of loss, depression and death have moved from the shadows into the heart of Harry’s world.

And even J K Rowling has famously run foul of American evangelical Christians, who improbably sniffed satanism brewing in the cauldrons of Hogwarts. The merry pranks, midnight feasts and sunlit escapades that fill the Blyton-coloured memories of many older readers now seem much more than a generation away. In fact, the "golden age" of innocence in children’s writing always concealed its fair share of revolt and dissent.

When, in 1945, Astrid Lindgren created her much-loved nine-year-old rebel Pippi Longstocking, Sweden’s leading publisher rejected this outrageous celebration of a rude, rough and disobedient girl. And in 1976, when many of the old conventions and proprieties still held in children’s books, if nowhere else in publishing, Judy Blume found herself banned across America when her novel Forever spoke openly of teenage sex. Now, more or less every taboo has been broken and every closet opened.

Blackman is not the first children’s author to look inside the mind of a teenage terrorist. Robert Cormier, over many years something of a byword for shock and scandal in children’s fiction, did so in After the First Death as far back as 1979, with its busload of children held hostage by a despairing 16-year-old. As for racial tyranny, Beverly Naidoo helped to open many young (and older) British eyes with books such as Journey to Jo’burg, which sends a brother and sister on a harrowing trek across the benighted landscapes of apartheid South Africa.

In much the same vein, Elizabeth Laird has recently dramatised the plight of Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank in her book A Little Piece of Ground. As for modern war and its emotional fall-out, a mushroom cloud of titles has drifted over the cultural landscape — from Robert Swindells’ Brother in the Land in the 1970s and Raymond Briggs’ post-nuclear comic strips in When the Wind Blows to Meg Rosoff’s award-winning, top-selling How I Live Now.

— The Independent

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