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One Man's Trash, Another's Sea Change [Book Reviews]
Trash is the story of three "dumpsite boys" who in the course of their daily foraging through literal mountains of trash, come across a small bag containing keys to a secret that just might change everything around them. The boys are Raphael, Gardo and Rat, and the three live in an unnamed poverty-stricken country rife with political corruption. The boys live on the outskirts of a city, where people live in homes made of truck-pallets and canvas and make the most meager of livings scavenging in the trash. From this description, you'd be forgiven for thinking Trash was just another of the countless dystopian novels so popular in Young Adult fiction these days, but you'd be wrong. Despite the descriptions of landscapes which approach apocalyptic horror, author Andy Mulligan's book is rooted very much in reality.
Mulligan, who splits his time between the UK and the Philippines - where Spanish names and influences mirror those found in his book - has mined his experience as a teacher in Manila for inspiration. Look up the Smokey Mountain landfill in Manila for an idea of the desperate living conditions faced by not only the characters, but real life dumpsite children.
Trash is told in a series of first person chapters by the three boys, with occasional interjections by other characters who become involved in the boys' adventure. While the decision to tell the story in several voices was probably a wise one, as it adds depth and interest, the voices of the boys themselves were, at times, hard to differentiate. Raphael, who begins the tale and actually finds the bag, came across as the least well-drawn of the three main characters. Nevertheless, Mulligan keeps the tension running high for most of the book, withholding certain key facts from readers even after the narrators have discovered them. The situation is also flipped and on more than one occasion, the reader knows more than the boys do, a trick that largely works. However, Mulligan loses steam toward the end when the reader is made aware of what amounts to the final piece of the puzzle about thirty pages before our heroes catch on. This wouldn't be a problem if there were something else to keep the suspense up, but instead the reader is just left waiting for the characters to come to the same realization so that the story can end. The book is listed as being for the early high school set, but even they will have figured out the mystery long before Raphael and his friends do.
Minor problems aside, Mulligan has written a compelling story of survival, luck and ultimately, justice. In the end, the book's biggest strength may not be from its storytelling, but from its ability to open the eyes of its presumably young readers to the plight of children living in unimaginable squalor, as well as a level of political corruption that they may not have previously given much thought to. That Mulligan is able to bring these issues to light simply, and without preaching, is to be applauded. One only hopes that readers will realize that while Trash is a work of fiction, it is based on very real circumstances faced by very real people.
Moving from Trash to treasure, we have Jeremy Page's novel Sea Change. To put it as simply as possible, Sea Change is a beautiful book. Readers first meet main character Guy in the middle of an idyllic day spent with his wife and their young daughter. Father and daughter stop to examine their reflections in a drop of dew while mother reads poetry while sitting on a broken tree branch. Things quickly take a surreal turn, however, and the simple pleasures of the day turn to horror. Every moment of the quietly harrowing first chapter is written with absolute masterly control of both pacing and language. In a lesser writer's hands, the devastating events could veer into Nicholas Sparks territory, but Page is so understanding of human emotion that not a step feels false.
When we next pick up with Guy, it is five years later and he is living alone on an old Danish barge in the North Sea. Every night before he goes to sleep, Guy writes in a diary the life which he could have been living if not for the tragedy which shattered his life and took his family. "A film of his own life, but not quite his own life - a life made complete by imagining just how it might have been. If." Now that's a fairly depressing premise, but Page uses his considerable skill to keep the book from becoming too mired in the sadness of Guy's circumstances.
The specificity and care Guy (and Page) puts into the diary entries make it easy to believe in the truth of the future stories. Once or twice, you may find yourself lost in the vision of the future that Guy creates, as he himself does. At the very least, it is easy to understand how important the writing is for Guy - how it has become a kind of addiction. The diary entries are doubly important in that they also give the reader the only real glimpse into the characters of Judy and Freya, Guy's wife and daughter. Particularly touching, and perhaps unexpected, is the fact that Guy does not merely write an idealized version of his wife and daughter in the diary stories. Rather, they are still very much fully-drawn characters, even if they only live in his imagination. He doesn't shy away from giving them the difficult and unpleasant traits they may have had while they were still in his life. "It's a wonderful thing to write," Guy thinks, "You can reclaim the things you lost." And the reader believes him.
At its core, Sea Change is a meditation on grief and the ways in which people struggle, cope - and, perhaps finally - move on. By turns intimate and grandly cinematic, Page's book is deeply moving. If you are looking for melodrama or manipulative tugs at the heartstrings, you won't find them here. But if you are up for an honest look at the pain and beauty which life can bring, then this gem of a book will do quite nicely.
