Alex Smith, Devilskein and Dearlove (2014)

The publisher's website for the book is here. This is an endearing if uneven YA fable about a traumatised South African orphan being raised by her aunt in an apartment block who befriends the minor Devil on the top floor. Said demon (‘Devilskein’) trades souls, but takes a liking to the precocious young Dearlove; indeed he—and his talking cricket, the metamorphosed soul of an ancient Chinese warrior—come to love the girl, for all that she is exceedingly bratty. To begin with he hopes to snaffle her soul, together with the soul of her ‘soul mate’, the dishy young teen hero who also lives in the block; although the course of the novel—not without some sentimentality—traces his path away from such evil. But Devilskein has in his gaoler-care the Son of Satan, one ‘Julius Monk’, devilishly handsome and deeply wicked, who more-or-less seduces Dearlove into releasing him. The Unique Specialness of Erin Dearlove is repeatedly insisted upon without ever quite coming alive (that is, it’s told not shown) in the novel itself. The whole is too long, the story structure is on the baggy side—where YA is concerned it has very much not gotta be a loooose fit—and the dialogue is pretty feeble. On the plus side, there’s enough left-field-ness in Smith’s imagination to make many of the episodes really stick in the reader’s head. The SA setting is treated as a normal backdrop, rather than being played up for its SA Tourist Board Qualities, which is very good; and there is something beguiling about Dearlove’s bland courage as she repeatedly engages with creatures monstrous, dangerous and evil

One problem, though, bugged me. Reading this I thought more than once of Dahl, and specifically of James and the Giant Peach: another story about an orphan who goes to stay with aunts (thought Smith’s aunt is considerably nicer than James’s two), whose meeting with a weird fellow sets in motion bizarre adventures involving talking insects and other inventive monstrosity. But Dahl’s book somehow works in way Smith’s doesn’t. It may have something to do with the implied Christian superstructure of Smith’s fantastical narrative (though no specific reference is made to Christianity in the novel). But I think it’s something else. Dearlove lost her family in an assault on their humble farm; the robbers shot her parents and brothers dead, but missed her because her mother had hidden her in a cupboard. A magazine in that cupboard furnishes her with the materials for a compensatory fantasy that enables her to deal with the terrible emotional pain—her father was a millionaire and her family lived in a huge glass mansion until a crocodile ate her parents. Her aunt colludes with this fantasy because she understands it to be part of the process of coming to emotional terms with the horrible events through which Erin has lived.

But wait: where does this leave Devilskein, the talking cricket and Julius Monk? Are they also fantasies spun out of Erin’s imaginative but damaged head? The comparison with Dahl’s story is interesting, I think. Like Erin—or like Fantasy-version Erin—Dahl’s James loses his parents to a large African beast: you’ll remember that on a shopping trip in London, James’s mother and father are eaten by an escaped rhinoceros, despite the fact, as the narrative specifically tells us, that rhinoceroses are herbivorous. James’s two aunts are cruel to him: he doesn’t have enough food to eat, has no friends and is horribly bored. The story that follows is pure imaginative compensation: a vast embodiment of succulent and delicious food squashes both his tormentors dead; inside it he finds a group of new best friends and goes on amazing and diverting adventures. In other words, what James and the Giant Peach never spells out, but what is implicit in every page of its narrative, is that James’s adventures, like the impossible mode of James’s bereavement, are figments of his imagination. (Not that James is not bereaved, for he is clearly that; but that he has constructed a more ‘interesting’ narrative to explain his parents’ death in a traffic accident, or of Spanish flu, or whatever) Read this way the book becomes a testimony to the prodigious power of kids to imagine their way out of present misery. And this could be what Devilskein and Dearlove is about too, except that by specifically drawing our attention to the fact that Erin has fantastically reimagined the mode of her parents’ death, the novel confuses the ground of its subsequent fantasy elements, and dilutes the effectiveness of the whole. Or so it seemed to me.