The Shell House
by Linda Newbery
336pp, David Fickling Books, £10.99
Graveney Hall is literally a shell, burned out and abandoned for decades, but the extensive grounds are being restored by a group of enthusiasts. Among them is Greg, a young photographer looking for a subject. Greg's life is taking off in all directions. In the first year of sixth form, he has lost his long-time buddy who has left school, and strikes up a friendship with Jordan, the only other boy in his English class where they study first world war poetry.
Jordan is a serious, beautiful youth and Greg is deeply confused about his feelings for him, the more so because he is highly attractive to girls, particularly Tanya, who has no sexual inhibitions whatsoever and lays him for a bet, and Faith, Christian daughter of Christian parents who are working on the Graveney Hall gardens.
Alongside the contemporary narrative of this novel, shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Award, runs the story of Lt Edmund Pearson, last heir of the Hall, and his relationship with another young officer, consummated amid the chaos of the western front in 1917. The two strands never quite converge, but continually intertwine, although they are sometimes in danger of being lost among contiguous threads that turn out to be thrums. Edmund has no doubts about his own orientation; he is prepared to abdicate his inheritance for his lover's sake. Greg has no such certainties, but Jordan is gay and their association attracts homophobic hostilities from other boys at their school.
In 1917 Edmund would be a soldier-poet, attempting to declare in verse what he cannot articulate. He is no Wilfred Owen but his touching, not-terribly-good poems repay attention since one of them holds a clue as to what might have become of him after his disappearance, and presumed death, at the time of the fire.
Jordan, in 2002, has come out to his parents but dare not do as much to his school friends. Edmund, confessing his secret to the vicar, who has invited his confidences, is told that this is bestiality, depravity, a filthy indulgence. It is, moreover, a crime in that illiberal period; he faces more than social persecution. Before climbing into bed with Alex, in their French billet, he turns a picture of the crucified Christ to face the wall. "I don't think he'd approve." "Superstitious nonsense," Alex says. "We're here to kill Germans. Is this more sinful than that?" When Alex dies of his wounds, Edmund's faith dies with him. A redemptive religion offers no comfort to one who has already seen Hell.
Greg does not subscribe to the doctrine of Hell. Sex is not much more of a problem for him than is accepting Faith's Christianity, as is accepting his atheism for her. Her declarations of an unquestioning belief in God's Plan are tooth-grindingly clichéd but so, from her point of view, are his rebuttals. What about Auschwitz? What about Jordan's young sister facing an early death from kidney failure? Where's an all-loving God in that?
Faith is the most difficult character to warm to - aside from the ones we are invited to dislike. Her piety is all conventional platitudes, her Christianity does not make her especially humane, and her sudden loss of faith - "Call me faithless," she says bitterly - is equally conventional and fairly unconvincing. This may or may not be intentional. Alex and Edmund are prepared to live and die for what they believe in; Jordan would like to; Faith can only talk about it, reinforcing the thought that so often surfaces when reading narratives where time overlaps: on the whole, these days, most of us are not required to face very much, breaking down long before we are tested to the limit.
· Jan Mark's Heathrow Nights is published by Hodder