The Five Boys

Mick Jackson

This is the second Mick Jackson I've read, after his intriguing Booker-nominated The Underground Man. I picked it up in a charity shop in Edinburgh this summer, because a holiday isn't a holiday if you don't use it to buy books.

Five Boys is both less linear and more singular than The Underground Man. Browsing the author's website, I find it interesting and unsurprising that the book had a completely different title, The Bee King, until the last minute. It certainly doesn't read like the story of the five boys, beginning to end. It doesn't read like the story of the bee king, either.

It reads excellently, though. Eccentric and witty I expected from Jackson, but humane and a touch of sadness are happy additions. I don't want to kill the allure of the book by saying this, but it is uncompromisingly pleasant to read. That feels a bit like the Hitch Hikers Guide calling Earth 'harmless,' but I mean it as a compliment.

Five Boys is mysterious, in that it doesn't bother to explain itself on most occasions. That fits, I feel, with the children's perspective that a lot of this book is told from. The world is what it is, and most young boys take it on those terms. It's only when you're older you sometimes recognise how weird some childhood incidents were.

The mystery is never solved; the book doesn't have a loose end-tying, all together-bringing finale. It's uncohesive, but not in a bad way. The whole thing is episodic, almost like a series of interconnected short stories at times, so there is no expectation of a last chapter to make it all make sense. It's not like reading Infinite Jest, where the reader is teased with glimpses of potential but never fulfilled cohesion. Five Boys is in no way frustrating.

The lack of cohesion, of a continous line joining the beginning and the end and everything inbetween, is in reality the lack of a main character. It seems like Bobby, the young evacuee, is the subject of the book--until the second half, in which he doesn't appear.Go figure, says the book, and I went and figured.

I figured that there is a main character, in a sense. It's the Devonshire village of Dartington, and its story is told through the partial lives of the people that make it up, good and bad and weird and stupid. Their little stories make up the bigger story of the village, just like each bee buzzing contributes to the singular hum of the hive. And the bee king is not really a king at all, but the queen of the Dartington hive.

The Underground Man

By Mick Jackson.


This was a fun one, and an odd one.

The plot is essentially--and I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but I'm going to--an old man. Okay, it's a bit more than that. It's an old man going slowly mad.

There is also a whole big 'secret' that is almost presented as a twist, but it didn't really hold me. I'd already guessed it quite early (not a brag, it was just a pretty standard assumption) and it wasn't that relevant. It played a minor part in the whole 'going mad' business, but it made a bit too much sense to really overshadow the other madness-bits. For example, the drilling of a whole in his own skull, and his subsequent psychic abilities.

So the plot is not a clever piece of careful architecture. But that's really not a problem. I've talked about it before, and I think I christened it the Wodehouse Method. That's a good name, so I'll call it that again.
The Wodehouse Method. Basically, if you write entertainingly enough, the plot can fuck right off.

Jackson approaches it slightly differently to Plum. It's entertaining, but not only funny-wise. It has a lot of funniness, but it's usually due to bits of slapstick* or caricature rather than wordy prose-lols.
Half the entertainment comes from the inclusion of curiosty and curious things. Wouldn't-it-be-cool-ifs, that actually are. The Duke builds tunnels under his house, has lots of interesting nonsense theories about people and trees, owns an excellent map, and finds religious text in his bread.
I think it's the theories that I will remember most. I love theories. I would really love to sit down and chat with this fictional old Duke. Alas, and all that. The chap is distinctly fictional.

So it's the Wodehouse Method, but not as we know it. But the underlying truth (be interesting, all is forgiven) remains... underlying-ly true.

Except it doesn't. Except it does. (Oh God, I think I just quoted the Doctor.)

It does, because I enjoyed this book, still. But it doesn't, because the flaw still shows through. I think this book could have been a lot better. There is such a richness of analogy in the Duke's musings, that they could have tied together beautifully into a clever plot, I am adamant. But they don't.
Maybe it's too 'novelly' to do that, but that sounds like grade A wankery, to me. You're writing a novel, you can make it as contrived as you like. You get to pick what you write about, remember?

There's an argument (I've heard) for realism in novels. That's all well and good, and I can think of a few great books I've read that function more like life than plots, and have middle endings, neither good or bad. But there's a time and a place. A 19th century Duke who thinks the moon is a hole in the sky? You don't need to be 'real'.

There's two lessons there. There's the same lesson I learnt with Jerome and his boring boats: you've got to be careful with the Wodehouse Method. Jackson does well with it, but he still could have afforded to tighten up the plot screws and dab the loose ends with liquid contrivace.

And: let a book be booky.


*One slapstick example of many: he gets really ill, thinks he's going to die, thinks he's giving birth to something, holds his candle down there to get a better look, the 'baby' is just a huge fart, straight throught candle, which sets his room on fire. It's funnier the way he tells it.