Sonya Hartnett: Of A Boy

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

This is such a tender, delicate novel, the writing like a sharp whip driving the story on to its heartstopping end, that it's no wonder it has just been awarded best book for our region in the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Hartnett is an Australian writer best known for her children's novels - Thursday's Child won last year's Guardian's children's fiction award.

"Perfectly crafted" would be the reviewing cliche for Of A Boy: at less than 200 pages it is tight and intense - and almost unendurably sad.

Somewhere amid an Australian suburban sprawl, in the cold autumn of 1977, three children go missing: "not lost or abandoned - they have been made to disappear", another boy, nine-year-old Adrian understands, as he watches the news on television just 20 minutes away from the milk bar where they were last seen.

Adrian himself is "a boy for whom life easily falls apart", and the disappearance of those other three becomes one of the many dark lines that run over and through his own experience.

Adrian's loneliness and isolation is at the heart of this novel. Abandoned by his parents, he lives, under sufferance, with his grandmother (who can turn suddenly into Grandmonster: "her concern emerges disguised as cruel rage") and uncle, who has problems enough of his own.

At school ("Monday waits like an axe", the narrator warns us), Adrian must use all his courage to stand alone in the cold playground, as he watches the kids who come from a local orphanage, some deeply disturbed, and in terror tries to convince himself of the difference between their situation and his own.

Desperately he tries to join in when other kids are taunting one of the most eccentric of the orphans, but feels bad immediately. His only friend is Clinton, but the tenuousness and danger of that relationship eventually reveals an excruciating truth about the lives of children.

Three children come to live next door to Adrian and, like him, we wonder whether they are the three, the lost ones, as if this might be that kind of story, that closes circles and solves mysteries. He makes friends with them, carefully, warily, and so the final act of this chill tragedy starts to unfold.

Big things, on the whole, don't happen in this story - the occasional references to events on the world stage, such as the dragging from the deep of the remains of an enormous sea creature, simply invite the question: what's a big thing anyway? Adrian is struggling to understand life, and little things - acts of carelessness, petty cruelties - are monstrous when viewed from a child's perspective.

Psychologically acute, Of A Boy is riveting: here, indeed, be sea monsters.

Viking $26.95