If it can be said on the strength of two novels that certain themes are a writer's stock-in-trade, then Robert Williams has made guilt, loneliness, secrecy and children's vulnerability his own. He is concerned with the fragility of the human body; how in our daily lives we are always a hair's breadth away from disaster, and how everything can be changed for ever in a second. His work is both strange and mundane, depicting people who do not fit in because the intensity of their private worlds estranges them from the wider community. His characters are the odd kids, wearing the wrong clothes, at the edge of the playground, and adults despairing behind closed doors.
Luke and Jon, his first, prize-winning novel, was an original and tender story of the redemptive friendship between two young boys: Jon, an orphan who lives with his grandparents, and Luke, whose mother died in a car crash and whose artist father is hitting the bottle. The driver of the lorry that killed Luke's mother takes his own life, although he was cleared of any blame for the accident. Blame and guilt are at the heart of How the Trouble Started, too. The trouble starts when Donald, an eight-year-old boy riding his new bicycle, collides with and fatally injures a toddler. Books about the deaths of children are often tainted, suspect and unforgivably exploitative, but, setting aside any resistance to its subject matter, there is much to admire in Williams's account of a bewildered small boy and his mother living with the consequences of the tragedy.
The story is narrated by Donald, now aged 16. After the accident, he and his mother suffer intimidation from local youths who daub "Psycho Killer" on their front door. They move to another Cumbrian town where their anonymous coexistence is enlivened only by visits to the library and Donald's mother's periodic rages and clashing of pots and pans. Every first-person narrative contains people whose inner lives cannot be revealed. Here, the mother cleans compulsively; she blames Donald for ruining both their lives and forbids him to tell anybody what happened. Donald's father is conspicuous by his absence. When Donald starts to befriend Jake, a neglected eight-year-old whom he watches in a school playground, the reader fears a terrible outcome, with the inevitable media description of a loner living with his mother. Cherchez la mum yet again.
Donald's behaviour, if we are to take him at face value, is naive to say the least. He forces his way into the child's house at night, takes him to a "haunted" house and stalks him in the park, all purportedly in the cause of amusing and protecting him. As Donald has two versions of the bicycle accident in his mind, one wonders how much one is expected to read between the lines. But then Donald is little more than a child whose life has been blighted; someone who, as he grows older, begins to understand the effect on the bereaved family of the child's loss, and must live with this burden. Tellingly, Jake is the same age that Donald was at the time of the accident.
How the Trouble Started is an unnerving read which raises questions about innocence and culpability. Yet, for all its sadness, it vouchsafes a cautious optimism at its close. Williams is undoubtedly a gifted writer and it will be intriguing to see where his imagination and strong descriptive talent take him next.
Shena Mackay's The Atmospheric Railway is published by Vintage.
