Book Review: What They Do In The Dark, by Amanda Coe
Amanda Coe is best known as a television writer. She wrote for Shameless and As If..., two of my favourite programmes. The first is about a working-class family who lie, steal and cheat their way through life; the second a gritty, urban soap opera about teenagers who basically do whatever they want, with not a parent in sight to tell them no.
Coe uses her experiences writing for both shows in her debut novel What They Do In The Dark. The setting is Yorkshire in the mid-1970s, a grim place in which to grow up, regardless of your background.
Gemma's family are comfortably middle class. She buys sweets and the Beano from the newsagent's with her pocket money. She does well in school. She takes tapdancing lessons. She has Enid Blyton-type adventures with her best friend Christina. Of course her mum slaps her sometimes. What mum doesn't? At least she takes care that no one ever really harms Gemma... Her life revolves around Lallie Paluza, a child star whose uncanny impersonations of anyone from Bob Hope to Greta Garbo earned her her own television show, It's Lallie! , in which she sings, dances and acts in humourous skits. Gemma idolizes Lallie and fantasizes about being her. One day, right before the summer holidays, it is announced that Lallie's new movie will be filmed at Gemma's school and that local children are needed in order to be extras.
Pauline is from an infamous family. The Brights would be working class, if they could ever be bothered to work that is. Instead, their dole money is supplemented by petty theft, prostitution, fencing and drugs sales. The local PC Plod reckons he spends more time at the Brights' than at his own home. Nobody cares much for Pauline. She doesn't care much for them either. She cares for no one much, except for her mum who's away in Leeds. She certainly doesn't care two hoots for Lallie Bloody Paluza with her glitzy life and her perfect Hayley Mills looks and her stupid bloody programme on telly.
Lallie Paluza is living the dream. She gets to be on telly, make people laugh and earn her mum pots of money. What does it matter that life on a film set is anything but glamourous, that she never sees her dad or that her mum just brokered a deal for Lallie to star in a Hollywood movie, forcing her to leave everything she knows behind, without consulting her?
What They Do In The Dark is an astounding book. It closely examines the many ways in which adults betray and neglect the children that are left in their care. No one is blameless. Inept teachers, jaded casting directors, class-conscious parents, indifferent neighbours - every single one of them is culpable; every single one of them has a hand in the horrific event with which the novel concludes. It is a shock, and everyone will say they never saw this coming and how could this happen? But still... It had been in the making for generations. Adults were once children too; children whose parents, teachers and neighbours ignored them. So in turn they grow into people who cannot cope with their own lives, let alone that of a ten-year-old.
I cannot think of any book with which to compare it. Some parts reminded me of Jonathan Coe, who writes about the 1970s with verve and painful truthfulness. Some parts could have been written by Scarlett Thomas, who has the same knack as Amanda Coe for writing about terrible tragedies with a matter-of-factness that makes the horrors on the page all the more vivid and heart stopping. On the whole, however, comparisons to other novels are impossible. This is a truly original work. It's a bleak book, written in a detached style that carefully ensures that the children's narrative voices don't sound twee and annoying or are dripping with nudge nudge wink wink dramatic irony to make the grown ups feel all knowledgeable and clever.
I read this book in one single sitting, although I admit I had to stop reading sometimes and think happy thoughts before continuing. The bleakness and horror creep up on you without warning. Instances of terror are written of so lightly that I found myself not fully absorbing what I had read and having to rewind a few sentences to make sure I had understood it correctly.
Amanda Coe is a truly gifted writer. Her unsentimental approach to life's big and small triumphs and horrors is wonderful and, frankly, petrifying.
What They Do In The Dark, by Amanda Coe
ISBN 9781844087068
Publication date: 7 July 2011
₤12.99
www.viragobooks.net