Cover: Holly Ovenden
Here is novel primarily for older teens. But it is a truly remarkable one.
Author Pull
I love books that don’t patronise their intended young audience, and this one certainly doesn’t. It is probably not a book to entice reluctant readers, but rather one for the confident and committed. For the right readers, though, it offers rich reward, as well as challenge. It will do much to lead in the direction of full adult literature, stretching awareness of just what fiction can be and do.
Even the title raises eyebrows. Runner Hawk No verb. No definite or indefinite articles. No comma. Is it one thing or two? It is enigmatic and rather brutal. Here is a writer who is not going to pander to you, his reader. It slaps you in the face without explaining why. And so, slight affront notwithstanding, it immediately pulls you in. Like title, like story.
That said, this is for the most part an easy, quick read in the technical sense. The challenge, the disquiet, is in the content, not in the language. Except, that is, for an occasional trip up over speech. The author never uses speech marks and only an occasional ‘said’. So it can be difficult to distinguish between what is voiced aloud, what simply thought and what just described. It is as if the author is saying, I am the writer. I do things my way. I won’t bow to convention, or to you. You need to stay with me. So you do. And again you are pulled along. And in.
There are passages here that feel as if they are directly borrowed from the author’s experience, vivid descriptions of places, incidents and reactions, If they are not actual recollections, then they are conjured with a wordsmith’s skill that conveys intense veracity. Either way they come across as a writing equivalent of hyper-realism in painting. They add a credibility that then bleeds into incidents in the narrative that otherwise seem bizarre, both to his narrator and to the reader. The building of this tension around what is or isn’t, could or couldn’t be ‘normal’ is brilliantly done. It is a big part of what drives the narrative so powerfully through the early part of a book where, superficially, very little is actually happening.
Frozen Copy
The focus of the text is a first person narrative by seventeen year-old Leo, reflecting with stark immediacy his thoughts and experiences through several days of a severe winter. Apparently a rather isolated, sheltered young man, he is clearly on the verge of physical maturity, but also, perhaps, of mental instability. He is experiencing a disconnect with reality. He reflects, I’d rather imagine a reality than know one.’ (p 57) He is aware that there is something wrong with him, but can’t begin to understand what. He sees strange phenomenon: a runner motionless in mid-stride, as if petrified; a hovering hawk fixed in the sky, but showing no sign of movement. He experiences disturbing physical episodes, where all or part of his body freezes into complete immobility. He cannot remember things he knows he should, like his previous birthdays and what presents he got. Later, he sees ‘ghost’ figures that cannot possibly be there. Is everything in his mind? If so his mind is decidedly weird.
Runner Hawk is all very bleak. I rather think a tag cloud for this text would bring out particular words huge and bold (at least that’s how it feels): Cold. Stillness. Seizure. Frozen. Standstill. Separate. Uncertain. Unstable. Beyond Time. Leo seems to have lost touch with truth. Everything around him seems pretence, fraud, not the real thing; a Beatles tribute band, pet dog cloned, lies he feels compelled to tell about himself to keep people happy.
With consummate skill, Michael Egan draws you into Leo’s disturbed and disturbing experience, and makes it riveting. I do not usually set much store by jacket quotes. But here the one from (the wonderful) Zillah Bethell has it to a tee. ‘Mesmerising Unsettling’. Yes it is both these. And both simultaneously. Two Words. Exactly So.
Girl Truth
Leo befriends Eadie, younger daughter of the local vicar, and is drawn into a pledge to help her discover the supposed murderer of her missing older sister, Becca. But A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, this book is certainly not. As his budding, but desperately inexperienced relationship with Becka develops, the mystery of her sister, if such it is, becomes only another aspect of Leo’s search for truth and freedom.
Ted Hughes wrote a staggering book of poems called What Is The Truth? That could well be the title of Michael Egan’s novel too, at least for its first two thirds. The question is Leo’s obsession. ‘I think that’s why I like Lucky Jim. (He says.) It’s all about truth and that’s something I think about a lot. My truth, what it is and how to find it.’ (p 73)
And then the story accelerates down a slope into what feels like a different reality, but has actually been there all along. The villages and fields of affluent, rural Cheshire segue into a vast glass pyramid, blank white corridors, numbered doors that hide clandestine research facilities. It is a world that feels like it belongs to science fiction/fantasy, perhaps because it does. But, for Leo, this is the world where his truth, his reality lies. And, when he finds it, it is a deep, dark, shocking, truth, both for him and for the reader.
Runs Flies
In many ways this book is as chilling as it gets. It is a very hard one to read, in the emotional sense. The back cover suggests comparisons with Never Let Me Go and The Catcher in the Rye that are at least partly valid. It certainly shares the affective desolation of the first of these great books. But it is ultimately perhaps a little more like the second; at least there is a glimmer of the carousel at the end. Finding Becca’s killer is not so much a goal in itself as a very particular and moving way for frozen Leo to find his own release.
To say much more, would be to say too much more.
Enough that Runner Hawk combines the sensibility of a true poet with the narrative power of a fine novelist. It may be bleak but it is also beautiful and deeply affecting. It is devastatingly brilliant, and provokes a lot of thought about some of the big issues in life. It runs. It flies.
