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It might sound like a potentially familiar narrative: a queer coming-of-age story, charted across one single heat-crazed summer in the 70s. From its very first paragraphs, however, this debut novel feels different. Madeleine Dunnigan immediately takes us inside the head of her rather scary protagonist, and makes his adventures in teenage lust and self-awareness as involving as they are immediate. The writing is constantly surprising, as unafraid of sensuality as it is of the story’s repeated eruptions of brutality.
We first meet Jean, our eponymous hero, as he is about to take his O-levels. He is sitting them at the unusually late age of 17; later, we will find out that this is because he has a history of violence, and has been excluded from every school he’s ever attended. To the despair of his teachers, Jean seems completely unable to learn. He is also a Jew in a school full of gentiles, the lone child of a single mother, a county-funded scholarship boy whose friendship group is unanimously monied and privileged. This is not, however, the story of a queer outsider battling to find himself in a setting of dreary conformity. Perched high on the Sussex Downs, Jean’s school specialises in colourful nonconformists; known to its pupils as The House of Nutters, its regime mixes high-risk bohemianism with the occasional dash of old-school protocol. Crucially, it is isolated, and its pupils are all male. It is a classic microcosm; a petri dish alive with potentially dangerous experiments in masculinity.
Built into the opening of the story are two neat and effective tricks of timing. The action takes place in the summer of 1976; by setting her novel across months when this country and its cultures felt as though they were on the verge of explosion, Dunnigan makes her story rich with larger implications, both personal and political. And because Jean is still trying to achieve something he ought to have got out of the way when he was a child – his O-levels – his fumbling attempts to get to grips with his desires seem realistically out of sync with the more freewheeling sexual lives of his classmates. Jean experiences those desires as both aggressively infantile and disturbingly adult, and Dunnigan brilliantly embodies this duality in the shifting registers of her prose. Like Jean’s body, her sentences are wonderfully alive to physical fact; like his mind, they are in cool pursuit of what those facts might actually mean.
Clearly, Jean is a firework, waiting to ignite. The spark that lights his fuse is so small and fleeting that Jean himself almost misses it: a single ambiguous look exchanged with a fellow schoolboy called Tom. However, it turns out that Tom has been in the crosshairs of Jean’s sexual attention for some time, and the explosion soon begins. As it ripples out, Dunnigan is especially good at using a slow-burn disclosure of her narrative’s backstory secrets. Death, abandonment and sexual abuse have all helped to educate as well as damage Jean, and his journey from incoherent lust to self-knowledge is charted in a series of powerfully written set-pieces. His first head-turning experience of actual sex forms a diptych with the gory butchering of a carcass; his most essential childhood memory is spliced with the systematic destruction of a whole houseful of glass.
Like all good coming-of-age stories, the book has two opposing narrative drives: one towards disillusion, the other towards discovery. The disillusion comes when Tom, the boy with whom Jean falls powerfully in love, turns out to be a betrayer. The betrayal then enables the retrieval of that lost but crucial childhood memory, one that finally explains to the reader and to Jean himself his long history of self-sabotage. In that memory’s wake, Dunnigan allows the music of her hero’s internal musings to lift off into a major key, bright with the possibility of sunlight. This provides a genuinely moving conclusion.
This is an impressive and accomplished debut. Jean’s and his story will speak to any reader who is battling to understand themselves as the owner of a queer body in a treacherous world. It will also speak to anyone who can remember how glorious – and dangerous – it once felt to find yourself in possession of a fully functioning heart.
