More dark material

If there’s one thing guaranteed to send a reviewer’s spirits plummeting, it’s opening a book and finding that the spellyng is orl rong

If there’s one thing guaranteed to send a reviewer’s spirits plummeting, it’s opening a book and finding that the spellyng is orl rong. Bugga thys 4 a larque, hee thynks (awe wurds 2 dat effec). S’enuf 2 mayk mi brayne hert.

The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean is David Almond’s first novel for adults —his children’s books have won two Whitbread Awards. However, it shares plenty of the same preoccupations as his other work: mice, small birds, angels and an air of apocalyptic gloom. At the same time, Almond is clearly doffing his hat to Russell Hoban, who also started off by writing for children before moving into adult fiction, and to Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker in particular. Both novels are written in phonetics and set in a blasted futurist world where religious belief has slipped back into a swamp of superstition.

In Billy Dean the reason the spelling is so wonky is because Billy has never been educated. Born in a ‘tym of grate tribyulayshon’ after suicide bombers have blown the country to smithereens, he’s kept in a cellar for the first 13 years of his life by his hairdresser mother and visited occasionally by his father, a maniacal priest called Walter. Eventually, he emerges, to find himself a complete innocent in a corrupted world. His father seems to think he’s the devil while his mother is equally convinced that he’s possessed of special powers and able to communicate with the dead.
The first half of the book is brilliantly done — especially Billy’s sense of confusion as he swings between the magnetic poles that are his parents, wondering if he’s a monster, a saviour or somewhere in between.