Cover art: Andrew Bannecker
The verse novel can be an amazingly effective, and affecting, literary form in the right hands. And this powerful and deeply insightful example shows that Tia Fisher is most certainly amongst the authors who demonstrate its potential brilliantly.
Like not like
For me, Crossing the Line immediately threw up comparisons with two other outstanding books I have read this year. It has many important things in common with Matt Goodfellow’s The Final Year, also a verse novel. What these two works of literature have in common is their writer’s ability to craft poems, which are poems, not simply ‘verse’, or even, as I have seen in some alleged verse novels, merely prose broken into short lines. Both authors use their linked sequence of individual poems to express their characters authentic thoughts and feelings with precision. Both catch and hold a moving intensity in a small number of perfectly chosen words and images, laid out meaningfully on the page. At the same time they succeed in crafting an overall narrative that is complex and compelling, capturing tellingly the truth of their protagonist’s life. They communicates straight to the reader with consummate poignancy.
There is a good example quite early on in the Crossing the Line where a poem about the Alton Towers rollercoaster not only brilliantly captures the experience of the ride itself, but also provides graphic expression of protagonist Erik’s feelings when he hears of his mother’s pregnancy by a man he can’t abide. It is only one of many sections that take your breath away with the perfect aptness of image and form. Tia Fisher knows exactly how to say much through little.
There is further connection too, at least superficially, in that Crossing the Line takes up its protagonist’s life journey roughly where The Final Year ends, at Year 7, the start of Secondary School. However, this does not mean that the two novels immediately follow in terms of reader suitability. Crossing the Line is a hard-hitting novel about a boy’s descent into involvement with drug dealing, eventually ‘county line’ gangs, involving associated bad language and no little violence. It is deeply disturbing as well as richly rewarding, and probably not for younger readers.
And it is in this aspect that it reminded me of my second comparison, Brian Conaghan’s equally potent but devastating Treacle Town. In many ways both these books deal with similar subject matter, and with similar unflinching honesty too. However, Treacle Town is very much about escaping from the cloy of a particular urban environment, drug and alcohol abuse and street gang violence. Crossing the Line is a more individual journey. (although sadly, many follow it), more focused on personal circumstances and relationships, as it follows in intimate detail Erik’s troubled and troubling route into terrifying criminality. If the one book is about pulling out, this one is about getting pulled in.
Dominoes
The minutiae of daily life, and Erik’s turbulent emotional reactions, become important in Crossing the Line.. His life is lived small, and in the minute. Those without future have only the present. There are no consequences in the present. Consequences belong to the future. And for him, of course, the future does indeed bring consequences. And every nuance of feeling, every bad decision, as he struggles and fails to deal with heartbreak and hostility, his life collapsing in a domino row, is caught with turbulent veracity in Erik’s own voice.
In the end we are left with understanding and empathy even though it is without approval. There is a poem near the middle of the narrative when Erik’s squawking baby sister suddenly smiles at him, and for a fleeting moment he feels what it is like to be special to someone. We understand that Erik is not ‘bad’; he has been dealt a hand in life that he has not the resources to play. And so it plays him. He could have been helped .The question, the challenge, the novel poses for all of us is who could have helped him, when and how? The answer does not lie solely with others.
This is a deeply important book in the relevance of its story and a breathtaking one in the skill of its telling.