Five Boys

I enjoyed this but I have to say I didn't like it as much as Mick Jackson's previous novel "The Underground Man".

Thanks I quite fancy this. I will add it to my wishlist. (I loved his Ten Sorry Tales, but haven't read anything else by him.)

Five Boys isn't really a novel. It's more a scrap book about a small town in Devon and its adventures during the second world war.

It's a bit like a soap opera, in that a situation and characters are set up and then the machine is set in motion, without one clear thread of plot.

When 'Five Boys' comes to an end it is an arbitrary one. It's like Jackson could have continued to write about this little lost world indefinitely.

There's some lovely stuff about men return from war and no longer fitting into their families, stuff about young boys making sense of the world and, in the second half of the book, some lovely agrarian spookiness with the almost supernatural Bee King, who comes to the village and beguiles the boys with his buzzing world.

If you can imagine the darker, more inquisitive cousin of a Sunday night TV drama that swaps nostalgia for scepticism, then 'Five Boys' is it.

It's like Jackson has sat down and listened to the recollections and stories of older relatives, then set to work turning them from codified tales into real living experience, putting in all of the emotional detail that's missing.

Jackson writes well, and with a keen eye for how absurd the world seems through the eyes of a child.

Cheers,

Mark