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Kevin Brooks: Mystery without answers

21.11.07 Caroline Horn

Kevin Brooks is a well-known name in the young adult market, having broken onto the scene with a Branford Boase Award for his first novel, Martyn Pig (The Chicken House) in 2002, before being poached by Puffin in 2006 for his novel, Being. Puffin will publish a second book, Black Rabbit Summer, in February '08.

Black Rabbit Summer is about a group of teenagers, once close friends, who get together one more time before they all leave for their new lives at college or in work. Their meeting reignites some old passions and the events that follow, including the murder of a local celebrity and the unsolved disappearance of one of the boys, Raymond (the owner of the black rabbit), changes each of their lives irrevocably.

The events in the book reflect the extreme emotions that young people go through, says Brooks, but it was the sense of nostalgia for what is lost that drove him to write it.

"I wanted to explore the gulf between who you are at 11 and what you become at 16—what takes you from the bright-eyed child you were to the less bright-eyed teenager you become. The book has a sense of nostalgia and I questioned whether you can do nostalgia with teenagers —but then realised how different an 11-year-old's life would seem to the 16-year-old looking back. It would be unrecognisable."

Relationships are also more intense during these years. I can sense some of those confusing dynamics between friends when I visit schools and talk to teenagers. Girls tend to have close relationships with their friends. Boys too, when they are younger, but as they get older they question whether it is OK to like a boy as much as they do. There is confusion between having a very close relationship and loving someone without it being physical, and in Black Rabbit I explore what happens when the characters reach an age where physical feelings are there all the time.

"I think your identity is always in flux but the teenage years are so intense that only one thing need happen to send you off on a completely different direction. I am not looking for answers, I just enjoy exploring the questions—in this case, how you grow up and what influences you to become the kind of person you do.

"Many of my books leave issues unresolved, and it is the same with the question about Raymond—what happened to him? I never answer that question and I never let myself decide what has happened to him because that would alter the way I wrote the story.

"At the time I was writing, I heard that something like 600 people go missing every day. What happens to the people who are left behind? It must be the most terrible thing, just never knowing what happened.

"People are often critical when I leave questions like this unresolved. But sometimes things are much more interesting if they are left without any answers: that unknowing is much more powerful than a closed answer."

Authors Todays Picks Caroline Horn children's Kevin Brooks Spring Highlights

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