Books & Poetry

Timothy Dashwood’s life is one of unhappy privilege. He is bullied at his exclusive west London school, while at home his cold, distant mother leaves all domestic and child-rearing duties to the au pair. His father, too, is rarely around. An executive for a large oil company, Arthur recently returned from Baghdad where he was kidnapped and tortured by insurgents.

Gradually, Timothy starts to withdraw from family life and to dream with increasing clarity of his early childhood spent in luxurious compounds in the Middle East, and of a dusky-skinned, turbanned boy who perches high up in the trees in the communal garden outside his bedroom window, beckoning him to follow. Whispered conferring with schoolmates reveals that many of them have had similar dreams, and soon these mostly white, middle-class boys are disappearing, not just from Timothy’s school but from other private schools across the country.

You certainly couldn’t ask for a more topical novel than James Miller’s electrifying debut. It trawls the culture for our biggest fears and preoccupations – missing children, teen gangs, Iraq, the widening gap between rich and poor, ultra-violent computer games – and blends them into a speculative fable pitched somewhere between JG Ballard and John Buchan, to whose schoolboy orientalism it pays ironic homage. Allusions to ‘Peter Pan’ abound and run the gamut from the obvious to the winkingly subtle. Not everything works –  the initial transition when Arthur is released is jarringly abrupt – but for the most part ‘Lost Boys’ is beautifully structured, particularly the middle section where Arthur listens to a series of tapes which a private detective has made for him.

The writer M John Harrison once observed that most Western lives are pristinely devoid of the risks that are taken for granted in other parts of the world; so much so that we effectively ‘live in Disneyland’. As ‘Lost Boys’ leads you towards its horrifying, hallucinatory finale, you’ll feel compelled to agree.