Review: The Outcast – Sadie Jones

This review is going to run away with me if I’m not careful.  I started this book, The Outcast, on Saturday evening and finished it on Monday morning, finding that if I put it down, I was quickly drawn back to this mesmerising read. Frankly I’ve not read anything quite as compelling in a very long time (and look at the list of books to the right of this post and you’ll see that that’s quite a statement).

Matthew Parris, who chairs the Costa Book Awards, wrote in The Times, on Saturday,

I’d expected Sadie Jones’s first novel, The Outcast, already a bestseller, to be a front- runner (she has the reader siding with the bleakest and blankest kind of a man, and made me understand what I never thought I could: the thrill of self-harm)

The book didn’t quite make it to the Costas and I can only think that its competitors must be astonishingly good to have beaten it.

Lewis Aldridge is 10 years old when his mother dies.  Lewis was intimately involved in his mother’s death, and is marked by association with it in such a way that his father and the neighbours cannot deal with the terrible grief the boy experiences.  This is 1950′s Britain, when appearance is all and weakness in a boy cannot be countenanced.  Lewis has been brought up to address his father Gilbert as “Sir”, and this typifies the hands-off relationship, so badly equipped to provide the supportive father/child bond which might have helped them both to come to terms with the tragic loss.

Within no time at all, the dashing Gilbert finds his friends setting him up with various replacement young women, eventually settling for the pretty but ineffectual Alice, who is simply too young to be a replacement mother for Lewis.  Poor Lewis is marked by his grief and although Alice tries to mother him, she soon comes to see him as,

. . . broken, and that there was nothing to be done about it. She hoped he would mend, but she lost sight of the idea that she could help. He was like a damaged bird. And they always die . . .

It would be impossible to write about this book without giving away too much to any potential readers.  The themes covered, in agonising clarity, are self-harm, physical abuse and family breakdowns.  Jones’ hurting characters are doomed to act out their respective roles with a complete inability to break out from their destructive behaviour patterns.  Some of the characters are hateful, others are merely pathetic, but Jones has given Lewis and his friend Kit strangely charming and powerful personalities which work out a messy but poignant trail through the 436 pages.

And the ending is totally satisfying, with Lewis’ final reckoning with his father (so ably depicting complete parental failure) and then finally, a hint of another relationship to come which will surely offer healing to this troubled young man.

The Outcast reminds me slightly of Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes At The Museum, which follows the story of a similarly misunderstood child. In the video above Sadie Jones says that her favourite scene in The Outcast is towards the end where the family doctor has a genuinely helpful consultation with Lewis, and I couldn’t help but think of the scene at the end of Behind the Scenes where Ruby is helped to understand her past by a psychotherapist.  Sadie Jones also shows some of the qualities of Ian McEwan. I make these comparisons only as a tribute to this sparkling first novel which will make its readers watch out for more from this fine writer.