‘The white horse trapped in the night, eyes wide. Its pain so shrill it makes my head hurt.’ (p 74)
Rare and precious
Rare and precious
Jason Cockcroft is a significant book artist with jackets and illustrations for many excellent titles to his name, however, he made a huge impression with Carnegie Medal and Kate Greenaway Medal nominated We Were Wolves which he wrote as well as illustrated. Now he has followed this up with the equally fine Running With Horses.
In reading for young adults, fully illustrated text novels (as opposed to graphic novels) are relatively rare. Those where the images form an integrated partnership with the text, each contributing significantly to the overall quality of the reading experience, are even rarer. For the text and the art to have both been created by the same hand is even rarer still. When it does happen my admiration knows no bounds. So it is with both We Were Wolves and Running With Horses. Other recent works I would put into this same category are Pam Smy’s The Hideaway and Brian Selznick’s Kaleidoscope, although this latter is a collection of interrelated stories rather than a conventional novel. Nevertheless this is a small and very distinguished group of highly recommendable works.*
Does it follow?
Neither the jacket nor the blurb make any mention of Running With Horses being a sequel to We Were Wolves. However, although either book makes a totally satisfactory stand-alone read, the one does assuredly follow on from the other. With only a moderate time gap, the same narrating boy continues his story, and the trauma of the first book forms the backstory of the second. Now known as Rabbit, following a period of emotional stress-induced muteness, the boy was clearly not fully over his earlier mental and emotional disturbance. At the start if this new book he seems to be at least partially recovering, following a move with his mother to live in a caravan park on the coast. But this is no happy holiday resort, despite the park’s name of Happy Sands. It is bleak, even through the hottest days of the year, and oppressive because of them. Even more pertinent to Rabbit’s recovery seems to be the strong bond he has formed with Joe Fludde, a boy of dubious reputation.
‘Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m in love with Joe. It’s not that, not really, although there’s plenty who make jokes about it and take the mick when they see us together. But I do love him. He gets me, see, he knows me. Me and Joe, we’re closer than mates. Closer that we can get without being brothers.’ (p 17)
However, Joe’s actual older brother, Billy, is a very seriously ‘bad lot’ and the boys are led into a situation every bit as dramatic, and indeed traumatic, as developed in the first book.
Just as good
Sequels can be rather disappointing, especially when they follow up a super-impressive debut. But here the very qualities that characterised and so elevated We Were Wolves are carried through into a fresh narrative without losing one gram of their quality or impact.
One of the most telling aspects of both these books is the narrative voice Jason Cockcroft so skilfully crafts. On the one hand, this is the convincingly authentic, first person voice of a troubled boy. He is very much the product of his environment and upbringing, layered with the emotional trauma of his experiences. At the same time his voice is also highly individual; it can be lyrical, sensitive, descriptive, almost at times poetical. To achieve both of these without the one every rendering the other in the least unconvincing is something close to genius. And it gives the narrative a vividly visceral and intensely poignant reality.
The second amazing quality is the contribution of Jason Cockroft’s intimately integrated illustrations. That they are wonderfully drawn can be sometimes almost taken for granted, for these are no mere adjuncts to the text, but a fully complementary element of it. Time and again they contribute so much to creating and heightening both mood and emotions of the narrative. Even when they are little more than marginal strips, they help do much to establish, place, time, weather and atmosphere. When they are far more, they conjure a darkness that simultaneously harbours a strange luminosity. When of the daytime they convey the oppression of a hot summer; of night, grim terror, and the pervasive ghosts of non-existent creatures, Like the text, the images explore relationships, conjure dreams, and expose the harshest of realities with the same penetrating intensity.
His third triumph, closely interdependent, of course, is to create a narrative that is compelling, extraordinary, unsettling, unsentimental. It is sometimes terrifying, often brutal, yet is underpinned with a deeply effecting tenderness, a sort of rough beauty that leaves you distraught even as it horrifies.
The overall result is deeply truthful in ways that are utterly human and profoundly humanising. And at heart, for all its grit and pain and, yes, blood, it is about love.
Awards surely?
I know of few other masters of this hard-hitting , almost hyper-realism, capturing the lives of kids fighting for survival amidst family and social breakdown in highly deprived environments. The best comparators are perhaps David Almond at his grittiest (Kit’s Wilderness? The Fire-Eaters?), Anthony McGowan in his staggering quartet The Truth of Things or, further back, Janni Howker in The Nature of the Beast, and, of course, Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave (Kes). Jason Cockcroft’s writing and storytelling is certainly right up there with this elite group. Then when you add in the power and potency of his integral illustration, you have something quite exceptional.
‘Me and everything in the universe. All of it is one and together, held together with a love like atoms.’ (p 145)
The first of these two books was nominated for national awards. This second must surely win one or more. If it does not, then the world of UK literature is failing to recognise phenomenal dual talent as it should.
*Note:
Although very different from this book and each other, equally recommended as wonderfully illustrated, exceptional teen fiction are the following (however, each has an illustrator different from its author):
When Shadows Fall, Sita Brahmachari, illustrated Natalie Sirett
The Song From Somewhere Else, A. F. Harrold, illustrated Levi Pinfold
Phoenix, S. F. Said, illustrated Dave McKean
And The Ocean Was Our Sky, Patrick Ness, illustrated Rovina Cai
Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black, Marcus and Julian Sedgwick, illustrated Alexis Deacon
Wolfstongue, Sam Thompson, illustrated Anna Tromop
(A F Harrold, Sam Thompson and S F Said each have a new book out soon, which is very exciting. In fact, A F Harold’s may already be published, so I must seek it out pronto - from an indie bookshop, of course.)