In Depth
Sadie Jones: Boy misunderstood
05.11.07 Benedicte Page
Sadie Jones' stylish début The Outcast (Chatto, February), already selected as a BBC Radio 4 "Book at Bedtime", is the tale of Lewis, a young boy growing up in Surrey in the 1950s, who in childhood witnesses his mother's accidental drowning.
Mishandled first by his emotionally rigid father and then by his immature young stepmother, the early trauma hardens and Lewis' sweet nature is warped; he becomes self-harming, an occasional runaway, an arsonist and, eventually, a jailbird. But somebody loves him: little Kit, also with her own family tragedies, who grows up into a girl whose love might just turn a misunderstood and hurting boy around.
Jones says that her starting point was "the idea of somebody who is damaged, and who everyone turns away from instinctively, as animals will turn from something that's wounded; people are disgusted by a person who is hurt, because we find them frightening".
Though she barely recognised it on a conscious level until after the book was done, she was deeply influenced by the iconography of 1950s films: James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause" or Marlon Brando in "The Wild One". "I was so in love with all those romantic anti-heroes while I was in my teens," Jones says. "Marlon Brando does excellent male suffering, even in ‘The Wild One', when he's fat and it's ridiculous—such a period piece. He's the leader of a motorbike gang which terrorises small-town America, but somewhere at the core of it he's in pain. Misunderstood boys: love them!"
She finds it difficult, she says, when people ask her to describe her novel, because to relate the narrative makes it sound so black. "But because it's a love story, I don't feel it's this dark novel. The time is a very gorgeous time visually, with all those clothes, and the atmosphere of it, the lovely routine and ceremony of everything. Lewis' mother is an alcoholic, yes, but it's Pimm's and martinis. That's a lovely thing for me, that the darkness is couched in an almost erotic gorgeousness.
"I find Lewis very gorgeous too. I always see this sweet boy who can't manage, and there's that conflict between all the rage on the outside and this sweetness inside. If his mother hadn't drowned he would have been head boy. But he does this thing like trains do when they just head off in the wrong direction and can't do anything about it."
Jones had a 15-year career as a screenwriter behind her—interrupted only by "being rejected a lot and having children"—before she turned to novels. Despite the smooth handling of The Outcast, which she planned with precision to make the drama work on each page, she lacked confidence as she wrote.
"I never thought anyone would read it! I was so daunted at the thought of writing a novel, I felt so ill-equipped. There's a tuning-fork moment which you're always trying to get to—that bit where you feel you've nailed the narrative. I'm aiming for that all the time, first in sentences, then building up in scale. I felt that was so flawed and I couldn't do it, and didn't get it right, but was always trying."
RSS
Subscriber Content