Writers of young-adult fiction, ever keen to extend the boundaries of the genre, have in recent years shown a growing interest in matters such as autism, Asperger’s syndrome and, to a much lesser extent, the condition generally known as Tourette’s syndrome.
Brian Conaghan’s When Mr Dog Bites (Bloomsbury, £11.99) is a welcome addition to the novels dealing with the last of these, employing it as the central theme of what, according to the book’s cover, is “a story about life, death, love, sex and swearing”.
As the “story” develops it turns out that this is a reasonably comprehensive summary, even if it omits all reference to one of the book’s most engaging characteristics, its often hilarious (and often scatological) humour. Conaghan’s eyes and ears are perceptively attuned to the colourful excesses, linguistic and otherwise, of his cast of adolescents, resulting in a novel that entertainingly and sympathetically extends a reader’s understanding of those described by Dylan, its 16-year-old narrator, as “poor souls living in Tourette’s Hell Hotel”.
The setting is contemporary Glasgow, a city distinguished for its linguistic richness and rawness. For Dylan, a student at one of the city’s special schools, Conaghan has created an idiolect in which this environmental richness and rawness combine with the idiom emanating from the boy’s Tourette’s. The outcome is a voice that, once established, becomes immediately recognisable and remains credible throughout, though its tendency to repetitiveness blunts its ultimate effectiveness.
It must be said, however, that many readers – adult rather than young adults, one imagines – will find this aspect of the novel shocking, possibly even offensive, in its frankness.
As the result of an overheard, but misunderstood, conversation Dylan believes that his Tourette’s is a terminal condition, and accordingly he draws up a list of ambitions to be realised in the time remaining to him. These, as he himself expresses it, are the three “cool things to do before I cack it”. First, there will (he hopes) be “real sexual intercourse with a girl”; second, he will play a significant role in ensuring a happier, less racially harassed life for his Pakistani “best bud”, Amir; third, he will “get Dad back from the [Iraq] war before . . . you know what . . . happens.”
These three aspirations provide the basis for the novel’s structure: to what extent, and in what manner, will they have been achieved by the time the novel ends? Dylan’s dreams are skilfully interwoven in the plotting, but simultaneously each of them separately enhances our understanding of him.
The desire of the male adolescent to have “real sexual intercourse with a girl” may well have provided the subject matter for young-adult fiction almost since the day the genre was invented but rarely with the mixture of lustful determination and fumbling uncertainty that it is accorded here.
The portrayal of Michelle Malloy, the young woman Dylan singles out for the fulfilment of his sexual urges – "She oozed sex on legs, even though one leg was longer than the other" – is a wonderfully conceived piece of characterisation and contributes memorably to the novel's most diverting sequence, set at a Halloween disco.
Equally striking, though extremely different tonally, is the depiction of Dylan’s friendship with Amir, the Pakistani teenager who has long had to endure the racist taunts – and worse – of the city’s more thuggish elements. This is a portrayal of young male bonding, complete with all the lively banter of true camaraderie, at its most tender and affectionate.
It is when we come to consider the life that Dylan shares with his mother – and his absent father – that we have glimpses of the world of adult complexities. The relationship between the boy and his mother seems initially warm and loving, on both sides, even if occasionally (and realistically) peppered with frustration and angry outbursts.
But when a new car moves into what was once his father’s parking space, and its owner becomes a regular caller, the usually amicable domestic atmosphere is threatened. Before harmony can be restored some very painful readjustments have to be made within the quartet comprising mother, father, son and visitor. But Dylan, by the time we leave him, has grown into a much more rounded young man. As the words of Nietzsche, quoted on three occasions in the novel, remind us, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
Although Steven Camden’s debut novel, Tape (HarperCollins, £9.99), deals with some of the stock themes of young-adult fiction – principally, the losses and loves of adolescent experience – its treatment of these gives the book an intriguing originality.
Ryan and Ameliah, 13-year-olds growing up in, respectively, 1993 and 2013, and apparently unknown to one another, may at the outset have nothing more in common than the fact that their mothers are dead.
Ryan lives with his father, his stepmother and stepbrother, Ameliah with her grandmother, arrangements that bring their share of complex familial relationships.
The complexity intensifies when Ameliah discovers a tape on which, mysteriously, a male voice seems to be speaking to her across the decades. The first link in the chain of events uniting the destinies of the teenagers has been created. Camden explores subsequent developments in a teasingly structured narrative that convincingly moves between past and present. There is a great deal of cleverness here, nicely balanced by some subtle humour.
