Jane White
(Boiler House Press: Recovered Books 2023)
I was fortunate to be pointed toward this 1967 novel by Anne Billson, who wrote the introduction to this new edition. It’s a wonderful example of the flexibility of the crime genre. White employs familiar tropes to unfamiliar ends, brings in the mythic and the folkloric without attracting attention to the fact, even drawing on that hoary lynchpin of adolescent brutality, Lord of the Flies, without allowing the weight of it to drag down her own singular skillset.
An outline of the story gives no idea of its impact. As Billson writes in the introduction, this story of a boy held prisoner in the titular space by a group of slightly older boys ‘is more like a quasi-pagan rite than social realist violence, without any of the sadistic abuse featured in later novels of youngsters committing acts of shocking violence’ apart from a couple of odd, almost tangential moments. Unlike the grim sporting violence in an exotic location like Golding’s novel, this story unfolds across the rolling suburban landscape in the midst of a heat wave. The languor sweats out of the boys like the damp from the cave in the quarry. The unsettling sounds rise from the earth, like the seismic shiftings of the 60s themselves, the brutal reality behind the ‘Swinging’ decade and the sickness of the 70s that lie ahead.
White manages to walk a careful line between slice-of-life matter-of-factness and a growing sense of inevitable dread. Even in brief moments of light-hearted respite the weight of something coming darkens the skies…
Full review at the International Crime Fiction Association blog. More information available from the publisher here.