Out of Breath
Julie Myerson Jonathan Cape, 295pp, £12.99
A telling line from Julie Myerson's acknowledgements page makes reference to her three children, who at times have made the author long to "stop being their mother and be 13 again, running away across some dark fields with them". The yearning in that phrase, the image of the observer and the observed, the impulse to escape an allotted role, the need to slip away from reality, above all to recapture something of the thrill of being a child again - all these elements fuel the sensual, yet eerie mood of Out of Breath, which at the same time has urgent and concrete things to say about children and society today.
Flynn is the novel's observer, our 13-year-old narrator. She has spotted the foxes that live at the bottom of her garden; and she knows what to do with babies, having watched her mother feed and bathe her 12-year-old sister, Anna. Flynn can also tell just by looking at him when her 16-year-old brother Sam is feeling insecure (he pretends to look bored); and she can still recall the way her father looked the night he packed his bags and left (like a deflated balloon). Through Flynn, Myerson takes a sly swipe at a broken society where prepubescent girls have no one to turn to when they feel "panicky" or "out of breath". One option, Flynn has found, is to run away.
In this, she has much in common with Alex, the pale boy she meets at the bottom of the garden. He introduces her to the teenager Diana, her day-old baby, Joey, and a six-year-old pyromaniac called Mouse. The quartet are running away from a murky foster-family situation, the darkness of which Myerson avoids overplaying - which only adds to the deep psychological unease underpinning this novel.
With Flynn and Sam now in tow, the runaways discover a derelict house in a forest, Myerson subtly moving us away from the real world of mobile phones and shoplifting to the more fairy-tale world of pretty hollyhocks at the door and a dead man and his dog in the front room. The house offers a brief respite of childlike utopia, of Blytonesque food (creamy milk, or a cake with a cherry on the top), plus the space to grow emotionally and fall in love. The house appears to provide just what the gang need, when they need it - nappies, a shirt, fresh water. But it is not long before illness and near-death interrupt the idyll and the house starts to disintegrate around them.
Myerson is a sure-footed guide along the wobbly line that separates the real from the surreal. You could say this is a novel in the magical realism tradition, but it feels more grounded than that. We trust that the house can be both the epitome of nurturing and the embodiment of decay. We can feel the warmth of the freshly baked bread, but also taste the distress when the runaways smell the patchouli scent favoured by Diana's and Mouse's abuser. So, grounded, but still unsettling. Questions remain unanswered. How much of the experience in the house is real, and how much of it is a product of Flynn's imagination? How long, for example, do the runaways stay in the house? Twenty- four hours, as Flynn believes? Or nearly a week, as the others attest?
Myerson uses such narrative confusion to allude, with poignant accuracy, to that unsettling, wonderful, amorphous territory of adolescence. It's a tricky period for novelists to portray with any authenticity, and not just because most established writers left adolescence behind long ago. Adolescence is a time of great change. Myerson captures this beautifully in Flynn's compel ling voice. The opening of the novel is crisp and immediate, the prose simple and direct. Flynn is talking about Alex: "Then he saw me and he kind of froze." And yet, because the action happens on the cusp of puberty, it never jars that mere pages later Flynn speaks lyrically of her emotional confusion as being "like having mud oozing in slow motion in your shoes or a handful of velvet shoved between your teeth".
The last few pages take us back to the factual, almost brusque tone of the opening; any previous dreamlike quality has evaporated. The real world is reasserting itself. Myerson is never didactic, but you get the sense that what she is advocating is a little more safe play in the lives of children today and a delay in their exposure to the brutal realities (divorce, sexual abuse, teen age pregnancy) of the adult world. More than just a coming-of-age story, Out of Breath is a timely reminder about the importance of not growing up too quickly.
Lucy Beresford's first novel, "Something I'm Not", will be published by Duckworth on 15 February
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