Junk

Junk
By Melvin Burgess
Penguin. 278 pages. £4.99

Prize

There has been something of a furore over the Library Association's award of its Carnegie Medal to Melvin Burgess for Junk. The award - which makes Burgess the latest in a roll of honour that includes C.S. Lewis - was chosen from a shortlist that included several books dealing with bullying and drug addiction.
The judges remarked: 'It's good to know that the books on the Carnegie shortlist will help children explore the dark side of life in the safe, sensitive hands of such excellent authors.' Of Junk, they said: 'Nine narrative voices, each with a chapter of its own, are woven into the harrowing story of Gemma, Tar and their friends' descent into drug addiction. The issues are tough and the style compelling. We particularly admired the sensitive characterisation.'
It's entirely appropriate for Evangelicals Now to be reviewing the book. As winner of the Carnegie and the equally impressive Guardian Fiction Award (a previous prize-winner of which is evangelical writer Ann Pilling), Junk is already appearing on school reading lists, TV and radio programmes about books, and in bookshop displays. Most kids will find somebody or other advising them to read it at some point in the coming months. Many kids will do so.

Life

Let's get rid of a few media red herrings at the outset. The book is published by Penguin, not Penguin's younger reader imprint Puffin. It is marketed at the 15+ age range, not at very young children; it's a young adult book. Though sex and drugs are a constant theme, the author refrains from explicit descriptions. He is graphic and very visual, but no reader is going to get any sexual titillation from this book.
So what have we got here?
While it's not the best-written children's story I've ever read, it is certainly well written. You won't appreciate it by browsing in a bookshop; this is a book to read carefully. Using a variety of viewpoints and a deceptively simple style, Burgess constantly shifts the narrative focus: we see what people think of themselves and what others think of them, runaway kids' views of their parents and vice versa. There are many poignant moments. I was very moved when one runaway, who wanted to draw a picture for his girlfriend, wished he'd brought his pastels from home; but they were fragile and would have broken. The author doesn't have to elaborate who is really fragile and breakable in his story. There is a good deal of bad language, and sex and drugs are a strong point of the tale - which is shocking in the extreme when you realise that the kids involved in heroin and prostitution are as young as 12 and 14. The author assures us that the book is drawn from life, and I believe him.
And that's the point, I'm sure. If this were just a novel, it would have been an immoral fantasy about corrupting youth. But it's not; it's a 'fictionalised portrait'. This is what life is like for many kids in our affluent society. They made their own choices, they will have to bear their own share of responsibility, but you cannot finish this novel without wondering what one's own responsibility is in this matter. I guarantee you will look differently at the next teenage beggar you see after you read this book.

Readership

Who should read it? The young adults it's intended for will find it, in my view, a strong anti-drugs, anti-runaway tract. I wouldn't recommend it wholesale, but I would to quite a few young tearaways I know and also to some kids whose affluent cocoon could do with a few more windows onto the realities of modern Britain. But who else?
The easy answer is: 'Anybody involved with young people.'
I'm sure that's right. But I suggest two other readerships will find it sobering and, hopefully, a spur to prayer and action.
First, if you believe that the only proper evangelism is inviting outsiders into your church to hear the gospel on your patch and your terms, this book might make you think again. Many kids in Britain don't even know when it's Sunday, let alone how to hold a hymnbook. We have to take the gospel out, as well as invite outsiders in. And I do hope that nobody will despise Burgess's tentative, despairing appeal to God in the final chapter; that is more hope than many street kids have been given.
Second, those of us who have kids of our own who have sat under the gospel for many years and who in God's good grace and good timing have owned him as Lord, might find it sobering to read this book, give heartfelt thanks, and pray to be delivered from complacency. Tar, Gemma, Lily, Rob and the rest of Burgess's characters are, humanly speaking, lost souls. And many of us walk past them on our way to church.
This is a book to weep your way through. And I did. What now?

Prize

Life

Readership

David Porter

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