This book will teach children about death – and move adults to tears
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Whether it’s in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales or Goodnight Mister Tom, death has always played a role in children’s fiction. But in recent years, writers have confronted the subject more frankly. Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, in which he chronicles his devastation at the death of his teenage son, is widely recommended by grief counsellors; board-books such as Grandad’s Island (Benji Davies) now introduce the youngest readers to the concept of bereavement.
Matthew Fox’s latest book also tackles death head-on. Last year, in his debut novel The Sky Over Rebecca, he told the story of two young Jewish refugees from the Second World War. This time, in The Lovely Dark, our heroine is 12-year-old Ellie, who dies during an accident at an archaeological site while visiting with her friend Justin: “I heard muffled sounds around me and let out a breath of air from my lungs… there was a feeling of burning, and then a strange feeling of warmth and peace, and I was somewhere else.” On waking, she finds herself beside a mysterious river, guarded by dogs: “I remembered what Justin had told me about the ancient Greeks… The river was the Styx. It was the river of death and I was dead.”
Some readers will find this notion difficult. But Fox is a beguiling writer, whose prose cocoons us through the highly unusual adventures that follow. “I felt lost. I felt alone. I just wanted to be home, in the world of the living,” Ellie laments – but instead she’s trapped at Eventide House, a boarding school in the Underworld where there are no rules or lessons. Her fellow pupils have given up hope of seeing their families again: “Everyone wants to go back. No one does.’’ But Ellie knows that Justin must also be in the Underworld – and through her determination to find him, she discovers that her “death” is not all it seems.
Fox, an Oxford-educated philosopher, provides the reader with food for thought. Can the dead communicate with the living? Does the “particular arrangement of atoms and molecules” that constituted Ellie’s late grandfather still exist? But he has also created a convincing heroine to whose earthly concerns every child will relate: “To be honest I was a bit bored. I’ve wound up in the boring version of Hades, I thought. For boring people. Just my luck.” It is only at the end that the true hero of this deeply affecting story emerges – in a twist that left this not-so-young reader close to tears.
The Lovely Dark is published by Hodder at £7.99. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
