Teen booksReviewSimon Mason enjoys an exhilarating tale of Gypsies, young love and rebellion in rural England"It was three months after Mum left that the Gypsies moved in." To Iris's father and brother and best friend Matty, the family who set themselves up in the paddock over the road are trouble: thieving, filthy pikeys, impossible to live with and almost impossible to move on. But 13-year-old Iris (nickname "Eye, as in ball") finds them fascinating to watch. They are a complete family, for one thing. Her own mother has left home to work out a midlife crisis travelling – Gypsy-like – through Tunisia in a van. The Gypsy mother has a baby, four little girls, some dogs, a man and a slender, ginger-blond teenage boy.
It isn't long before Iris and the Gypsy boy (Trick, as in Patrick) strike up a friendship. But in the time-honoured tradition of Romeo and Juliet, their relationship is soon thrown into disarray by circumstances. Iris's father is determined to evict the Gypsies. Iris's 16-year-old brother Sam, disoriented by his mother's abandonment, falls in with notorious troublemaker Punky Beresford, another Gypsy-hater. And Trick's father turns out to be a bare-knuckle champion. Tensions mount until the volatile situation could be set off by the slightest thing, which duly arrives when Iris's father's shed is broken into. The result is violence, not just physical violence but also the agony of divided loyalties.
The general territory may be traditional, but Infinite Sky is very much its own story. It has the great power of ordinariness. Here is a slightly scruffy rural England of farmers' fields and supper from the chippie, and bored teenagers drinking on the cricket pitch, evocatively described in unforced, unfussy prose that is as comfortable with the natural world as it is with social worlds of home, school and – in the extraordinarily powerful final scenes – hospital. CJ Flood has a gift for small, purposeful details: settings, such as the charmed hollow in the cornfield where Iris and Trick meet on lazy mornings, or the riotous paddock at night as the tractors begin the eviction, are quietly but brilliantly visual and full of feeling. Her main characters are alive with the same sort of unshowy independence. Particularly good are Iris's bewildered father, emotionally out of his depth; unsettled Sam, propelled by his mother's departure from childhood into a confusion of bad behaviour; gentle Trick, unlucky enough to know more about fighting than he should; and Iris herself, a girl touchingly ready to meet the world with curiosity and hope. The story that unfolds is the natural combination of the competing desires of these characters – and all the more satisfying for it.
Infinite Sky is Flood's debut novel, and it's tempting to ask what marks her out. I think it's her lack of fear. It's noticeable in the details, which are so true to themselves without being showy, but more striking still, I think, in her storytelling. She is unafraid to enter the trickiest, most fraught areas, especially in the highly emotional finale. The fact that a whole novel's worth of unresolved questions remain only strengthens the impression that here is a story assured enough and tough enough to be itself, exhilaratingly uninterested in such niceties as neat conclusions.
Simon Mason's Moon Pie is published by David Fickling.
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