Wild Boy
Jill Dawson Sceptre, 291pp, £14.99
ISBN 0340822961
A 12-year-old child is found, naked and with the scar from an attempt to cut his throat, living wild in the savage hills of the Tarn. Post-revolutionary France is ablaze with rumour, and with curiosity to see whether Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theories on childhood and the "state of nature", in which primitive man was superior to the civilised, are vindicated. The boy is brought to Paris, where Itard, a young, ambitious doctor, attempts to teach him at the Deaf-Mute Institute. Out of this true story Jill Dawson has created a fascinating work of fiction.
She is scarcely the first to be attracted to the subject. Rome, supposedly, was founded by a twin suckled by a she-wolf; and Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Alice Hoffman have all imagined tales of the wild child far harsher than the versions of Mowgli and Tarzan paraded by Disney. The dawn of Darwinism put a stop to these fantasies of noble savages and animal grooms, but Dawson has drawn on its enduring myth to explore another increasingly fashionable literary subject, autism. Her exploration of the condition, as the mother of a child with Asperger's syndrome, is less buoyant than Mark Haddon's in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but no less tense and tender.
Itard, a good man in many respects, cannot understand why the boy he names Victor is unable to make progress. When he first sees him, "a crouching dark filthy creature" tied to a tree, he mistakes him for a dog, but even an animal has cleaner habits than this boy, who defecates wherever he feels the need. Victor learns only three words in his entire lifetime. Fashionable and foolish Paris believes he should be astonished by the city, not understanding that a glass of water holds more interest. Neither shoes nor a more varied diet appeals. His passion is for milk ("lait" is the first of his three words) and shelling peas. He shows no signs of sexual awakening although Julie, daughter of the novel's other narrator, Mme Guerin, flirts with him and hopes to entice Itard. In one gloriously funny scene Victor and the doctor are summoned to meet the society beauty Mme Recamier, who, surrounded by toadies, genuinely believes the wild boy will find her moving. Itard is increasingly perceptive about what Victor finds stimulating, but cannot shed his own belief in mankind. Depressed and disillusioned about Rousseau's philosophy ("But what does Melancholy Jacques know of infants? He abandoned all five of his own to the foundling hospital"), he puts on a brave front for bodies such as the Society of the Observers of Man but ultimately abandons his study.
Itard's struggles to introduce Victor to polite society equal those of Mme Guerin who, charged with giving him warm baths, clean clothes and meals, looks after the boy. Her water is drawn from a well, heated by logs; her beans, which he loves to eat, grow in a vegetable patch. She nurses the memory of her own dead son, rendered a "changeling" at two - the age that autism usually strikes - and is harrowed by grief at having murdered him with her own hands. Expecting nothing in return, she comes to love Victor as Itard cannot.
It is not easy for the reader to like Victor, although Dawson succeeds in making us see the world from his perspective. No sooner do the boy's friends accept his stinks, shrieks, restlessness and sudden switches of mood than his evil stepmother, Felicite Colombe, arrives. It was she who persuaded his father to take him, like Hansel and Gretel in the Grimms' fairy tale, deep into the forests of Aveyron and cut his throat. Victor survives none the less, and a "monster" sucking at his neck heals his wound. Now, finding the foundling famous, cunning Felicite wants him back.
This is the point at which you long for the novel to blossom into a full-scale narrative in its own right, but Dawson is faithful to what can be imagined from the facts. Her novel, suffused with wisdom and a compassion for each of her main characters, only just misses being of the very first rank. I have no doubt that, like her previous novel, Fred and Edie, it will be shortlisted for a number of prizes, but she will only get the readership she deserves when she delivers the consolations of fairy tales as well as their real-life shadows.
Amanda Craig's fifth novel, Love in Idleness, is published by Little, Brown
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