A Small Death

Thinking back to my reading in KL, as I was yesterday, the book which probably had the greatest impact on me there was the one I would have thought least likely to do so. I picked up Robert Cormier's After The First Death one afternoon when I fancied something reasonably light and pacey, basically to read in one or two sittings. Cormier was a particularly fashionable writer aiming specifically at a teenage audience in the 1980's. (I really have no idea of his standing these days - I don't seem to see his stuff around much in bookstores.)That's when I bought the novel, but I'd not got round to reading it before leaving it behind for my great journey east. I thought his best known novel The Chocolate War (occasionally compared to The Lord of the Flies in terms of its unflinching observation of the operation of evil in the lives of its young characters) was excellent, but I had been considerably less impressed by I Am The Cheese which seemed to me merely gimmicky and punching beyond its weight.

After The First Death is certainly ambitious, as its title suggests (from one of my favourite Dylan Thomas poems) but I think Cormier largely manages to pull it off. Basically it's an examination of the mechanics of terrorism, centring on the hijacking of a bus load of children, in which Cormier dizzyingly switches perspective between the viewpoints of the hijackers and their victims. It's a genuinely suspenseful novel which strives manfully to be fair to all its characters, treating them all with a real inwardness which puts adult 'thrillers' dealing with similar material to shame. But what makes it outstanding is the way Cormier renders the impact of the all-to-real mortality of its characters.

The death of one in particular is stunning in a manner that's the opposite of gratuitous. The awful logic behind the utterly cold-blooded murder is inescapable. You realise what must happen about a page before it does. The murder in question involves a character who has been created? evoked? with wonderful subtlety such that you (well me, anyway) feel something like real loss as their fate is played out. (Off-stage, finally, adding to the power of the sequence.) Actually it reminded me of something Stephen King achieves at his best: you like the character enough to care.

Nearly always when watching Hollywood movies these days I feel manipulated by them. I dislike that sense of having my strings pulled - but Cormier does exactly that (you can analyse afterwards how he achieves the effect he obviously wants) and it feels right, absolutely so. I suspect this is because the intense discomfort he creates is somehow morally right. Sometimes bleakness is all there is.