Alex Clark
The End of Alice by AM Homes (Anchor, R69,95)
This novel, an everyday tale of paedophilia and child murder in middle-class America, is published in paperback plastered with the panegyrics of American critics, united mainly by their admiration for AM Homes’s horrifyingly “real” treatment of a taboo subject. At the same time, the publisher’s blurb draws our attention to the “major controversy” that the book has engendered.
The novel’s narrator is a 50-something inmate of a high-security prison wing, on the block where they keep the “sexuals”. Clearly, he is highly intelligent, literate, urbane. These qualities occasionally — and here is one of Homes’s neater achievements — conjure a barely believable sense of humanity. Unfortunately, the narrator is also a convicted child murderer, the dispatcher of a 12-year-old girl, Alice, with whom he had sex both before and after her death.
Was she his only victim? Could she, in any sense, have been complicit? These are two of the questions which surface repeatedly throughout the book as its narrator tells a story in which self-revelation and self- fashioning are determinedly and consistently confused.
We are in the territory of the unreliable narrator, an area which becomes even more crowded once the prisoner begins an intense correspondence with a 20-year-old woman. Not simply a groupie, she herself has embarked on the seduction of a just- pubescent boy, the process of obsessional observation, pursuit and capture forming the mainstay of her letters. Of course, we can’t tell if their contents are in her head, his, or bear some sort of relation to the truth. All we can say is that the degree to which her prey responds, co- operates, and initiates their sexual and emotional relationship mirrors closely the narrator’s version of Alice’s behaviour.
If the currency that sustains novels like these is the play between our fictionalised narratives of ourselves against a roll-call of facts, and our expectations of the novel against what it really says, how far does The End of Alice succeed?
Well, it’s certainly ambitious, but it continually obscures its aims in clouds of overblown prose which do little to evoke the texture and atmosphere of proscribed desire, and over-signification which quickly spends itself. What it lacks in particular is the wit and intelligence, the control, to bring this variety of textual tricksiness off. The unfavourable comparison with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and not simply for the subject matter, is obvious.
But the subject matter does matter, and this is a sexually explicit and violent book. What it fails to do is to really illuminate the paedophile mind. For example, we know that child abusers frequently figure their victims as complicit, as far from innocent, as seducers far more practised than they are. We may even believe that a more complicated view of children’s sexuality does not completely rule that out. But if you wonder, as you reach the end of this book, why these things should be, and why its narrator inflicted 64 stab wounds on a 12- year-old girl, then wonder away.
Praise for novels like this often revolves around the belief that the novelist has been “dangerous”, or has “taken risks”. The new critical taboo, apparently, is “safety”. But actually, the risk here appears to be in the order of those incurred during superficially knuckle- whitening sports, the kind that turn out to be highly supervised and far less truly dangerous than, as the commonplace goes, getting in your car. The allure and the mystique of risk, then, without the consequences.