Teen fiction: Beginning with Breaktime in 1978 and now coming to an end with This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, Aidan Chambers has produced a remarkable sextet of young adult novels. Linked in content and style, they have attempted - often with controversial results - to extend the genre well beyond its usual boundaries.
In content, their principal focus has been on the new emotional, social and sexual domains which come with adolescence. In style, they have abandoned straightforward linear narratives in favour of post-modern metafictive techniques which allow for the frequent inclusion of a range of "non-literary" and semiotic devices, many of them deriving from contemporary popular culture. The principal consequence of this stylistic and thematic emphasis has been a series of novels distinguished for their explicit frankness and for the challenge they present to their readers to find their way through the numerous perspectives on offer and, indeed, to consider the nature and significance of fiction itself.
Where Chambers's earlier young adult fiction has tended to concentrate on the male experience of adolescence, This is All, as its subtitle implies, has a young woman at its centre of concern. This is Cordelia Kenn, almost 20 years of age, awaiting the birth of her first child, a daughter, and taking the opportunity of her pregnancy to review her experiences of life, love and, pre-eminently, loss since she was 15. An embryonic writer and poet ("making a poem" is "making love with words"), Cordelia's compulsion to write endows her story with linguistic and literary richness, enhanced by the fact that she is a very bright student pursuing an A-level English course while at school, under the benevolent supervision of a very sympathetic - in every sense - teacher.
The form adopted here by Chambers - that of the Japanese "pillow book" - turns out to be an extremely potent medium for the delineation of Cordelia's story. Defined in an epigraphic note as "a notebook or collection of notebooks . . . in which the author would from time to time record impressions, diary events, poems, letters, stories, ideas, descriptions of people, etc", it lends itself to a fascinating depiction of what Cordelia at one point designates "the uneasy, vulnerable, blossoming years of the early teens". Its ambition, its complexity and its length demand a slow, close reading, but one which will be more than repaid by the power and depth of its insights. They also demand an emotional and psychological maturity of response, a fact which for once justifies the "not suitable for younger readers" comment on the book's jacket. "Young readers" here will, in most cases, be those of 14 and under.
Readers who enjoyed an earlier Adèle Geras novel, Troy, will welcome Ithaka, even if, in overall terms, its narrative is not quite as richly textured. By way of background, Penelope is continuing her patient waiting for the return of Odysseus from the Trojan War and doing her utmost to withstand the advances of a singularly repulsive gang of would-be suitors. "I'll wait for him and be brave, just as I promised, but how my body hums with longing," she says early on, before the temptation to depart from her promise becomes too strong.
Our principal attention, however, is directed to a group of younger characters, mainly female, whose destinies become part of the passion and intrigue which typify, mainly because of the intervention of the gods, Penelope's household. The allocation to these young people of such a significant role in the proceedings has the effect of giving the novel a strong contemporary feel, an impression strengthened by Geras's skilful employment of a colloquial, "modern" idiom which manages not to detract from the mythological underpinning of Homer's story. Formal and informal combine in the mischievous (and often violent) dissection of love and lust which lies at the heart of this colourful and accomplished novel.
The need by Geras's young characters to confront their moral responsibilities is shared by 13-year-old Cassina, heroine of Nicky Singer's The Innocent's Story, albeit in a setting which, in time and place, could hardly be more different.This is the Britain of 2005, where a suicide bomb attack would seem initially to have killed the young woman. She survives, however, as "solid 13-year-old hominid becomes small, exhausted patch of mist", a transmutation which allows her to live, literally, in the minds of a variety of other humans, ultimately including Akim, the man who had been responsible for her "death". This is an original, often blackly humorous novel which sets out to probe beneath the surface of easy assumptions and to impel its readers to question the meaning of such overused facile notions as are often implicit in terms such as "guilt" and "innocence".
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children's books and reading
This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn By Aidan Chambers The Bodley Head, 808pp. £14.99
Ithaka By Adèle Geras David Fickling Books, 405pp. £12.99
The Innocent's Story By Nicky Singer Oxford, 217pp. £12.99