The comforts of oddness

Jane Gardam

FIVE BOYS by Mick Jackson Faber, £10.99, pp. 248 ISBN 0571206131 Mick Jackson has waited four years before publishing his second novel, the first being The Underground Man which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1997. The same ferocious face looks out at us from the back flap. This must be a man of wrath? A man perhaps not unacquainted with semtex and the Maze?

Nothing of the sort. The earlier novel, a brilliant, fictional portrait of the fifth duke of Portland, the duke who dug all the tunnels, for no apparent reason, beneath his stately home in Nottinghamshire and who was reputed to be a monster, is a most tender book, understanding the contribution eccentricity has made to English history. This second novel is no less loving and more aware of the evil that lies behind the windows of the poor and innocent village parlours. There is an affectionate scene in which a boy kicks at a hole in the wainscot of a derelict house, very jaunty, and releases 'a river of rats'.

Five Boys, a century on from The Underground Man, is an historical novel too, but set in living memory in the West Country of 1939-44. In the rest of England the West Country was considered to be out of the war and very comfortable. Jackson has obviously had a good time researching the living memory and has found that it was otherwise. Nottinghamshire may suit his quirky nature better. It is still a rough-cast county of dark woods and old mine workings and great houses. It's the county of D. H. Lawrence and Samuel Butler. It suits Jackson's gift for conveying fear and passion. The West Country is well known and easy and suits almost any genial folk.

As Graham Swift chose the landscape of Waterland because it seemed so dull, perhaps Jackson was drawn to Devon because of its surface prettiness? He remains sternly unseduced by it. There are no charming people who say 'nedearor give you a cream tea, though in the war I dare say there were no cream teas on offer. It was the invasive GIs with their tinned fruit who cheered up the local menus as they cheered up the local girls, and who also died in the scandalous local mock

battle of Slapton Sands.

I suspect it was the enormity of the battle of Slapton Sands that lit the spark for this novel. The true facts of it, long 'TopSecret'. have edged forward the past five years, but have been uneasily and widely known for 50, and they are the grim and proper fodder for a novel.

Jackson addresses them obliquely, reporting the 'battle' with its mistaken live ammunition going on just offstage. The society we meet in chapter one, static for centuries, in part two is removed from its roots inland, not to be allowed back for years. This happens between chapters. Barbed wire goes up. Sentries parade. Nobody actually complains. It's the war, and nobody knows what anybody is doing anyway.

There is a set-piece sortie, that reads like an episode from a French sitcom, of hungry villagers dressed as mourners and carrying an empty coffin going back through the wire to capture an abandoned pig. They hear gunfire and see ships that could he German hut treat it as a silly joke. The Americans are being exuberant, as they are at the village hops. Glorious well-fed young men at ease with their own bodies' giving the village girls their new nylons.

In 1939, chapter one, the village was quiet and sleepy, a picture-postcard place that was going to miss its church bells and would continue to tend its war memorial. The usual English characters abound, though they do more daring and salacious — and funnier — things than Agatha Christie ever knew. Into their midst comes a very small evacuee from London who has somehow lost his group on the train ride. He is carrying his gas mask but has mislaid his other luggage. There is no sign of his name or address.

Bobbie is thrust upon a terrified spinster unacquainted with boys and her endeavours with him are tragi-comic. His first morning he is sent out into the landscape 'to play' and observes green fields he has never imagined and country yobs he cannot comprehend. The yobs are the five bad boys of the village, thought to he 'satanic'. but even their cruelty to Bobbie, Jackson makes funny. Bobbie endures it with sad equilibrium and the stoicism of Richmal Crompton's William Brown.

But this is a sweet boy, an accepter. philosophical even after the scorched earth of Slapton. There is a beautiful scene at the end of his years in the West where he stands calmly and knowledgeably feeding the farm animals as his mother returns to him across the fields.

But the book comes to grief with the exit of Bobbie and the introduction in part two of a mysterious stranger, a bee-keeper. He's a Greenish Man creature, rather like the Berry Man in the earlier novel. By ignoring the boys at first, he enchants them. By teaching them skills without issuing commands he lures them away. A comic chase by assorted parents in small boats almost to the open sea ends with pagan goings-on at a cliff-top encampment, the bee-keeper towering over them all from a tor. This I don't think comes off.

Also, the disappearance of Bobbie halfway through the book, though it's obviously a considered decision, a gesture against the old-fashioned novel, is maddening. Dickens, and there is a decided notion of Great Expectations in the vivacity of the opening chapter, would not have done this, for it makes the reader miserable.

And the title, Five Boys. The jacket shows the wrapper of a Fry's Five Boys chocolate bar, a much loved threepenny delicacy in the war, though what a good Quaker firm like Fry was doing promoting these five revolting, cherry-blossom-coiffured fat lads with cheeks bulging with chocolate I don't think anyone ever knew. Their expressions are captioned from (1) Desperation (for chocolate) to (5) Realisation (that in chocolate is fulfilment). I remember these bars, and that girls didn't think much of them.

They must have sold, of course, as did Bisto's zany kids (on the backs of buses) inhaling steam from a pot, and Startrite Shoes' two children hand in hand on a long long road called The Radiant Way (Margaret Drabble called one of her novels The Radiant Way). But maybe that was a First Reader? It is all very odd.

But then, in 1939, England was very odd. It would still have been able to accept a tunnelling duke. 'The Comforts of Oddness' is. I think, the message of Five Boys. But I don't think that it is sufficient for a novel. Patriotism is not enough. These are moving, ironic, weepy, comic, macabre, uneven sketches of wartime England, but sketches they remain.