Books & Poetry

In 1995, French director Mathieu Kassovitz released his flamethrower of a film, ‘La Haine’, about racism and violence in suburban Paris, to widespread critical acclaim. Remarkably, it was championed by Alain Juppé, the then-French Prime Minister, who pressed everyone in the senate to see it. ‘Apples’, Richard Milward’s unbelievably good, affecting, unpretentious debut novel, shares with that film a sense of having spun art of what would otherwise be another po-faced news feature about youth culture. And, at the risk of sounding preachy, if you were a politician looking to get to know your younger constituency, you’d do well to read this book.

‘Apples’ is set in Middlesbrough, where the author – who’s now just finishing his second year of university – grew up. With just a few exceptions the novel is alternatively narrated by two 15-year-old characters called Adam and Eve, both of whom live in the same white ghetto. Adam is a withdrawn Beatles obsessive with a violent and overbearing father. He falls for Eve, a vulnerable cool-kid who knows her way around a club toilet and the back seat of a car. It’s really Eve’s book, from its chaste opening line – ‘We got a McDonald’s the night my mam got lung cancer’ – to its edifyingly unsentimental conclusion in a spivvy Spanish resort town. But ‘Apples’ never feels anything less than well-balanced, nor are its technical gambles (there is a chapter narrated by a butterfly) irresponsibly foolish.

There’s a fine irony, which won’t be lost on anyone over the age of eight, in using a northern council estate to re-tell the myth of the Garden of Eden. However, more than anything, ‘Apples’ feels truthful: whether the drugs, the sex, the boozing or the brutal insecurities of adolescence, it all smacks beautifully of the real thing.