80 Books No.27: How the Trouble Started by Robert Williams

I only recently read Robert Williams's previous novel (Luke and Jon) and I actually bought both these books in the same sale. It was probably a rather risky thing to do, buying two books by the same author, having never heard anything about either book, but hey, I'm crazy like that.

This book delivered a little more than Luke and Jon did, at least for me, with my weird obsession with disturbing evil children. In this, Donald relates 'how the trouble started' when he was eight and he was involved in the death of a young child. This leads to a move and his isolation from everybody, including his mother who blames him for the change in their lives. Now sixteen, Donald relates his growing friendship with a lonely eight-year-old boy. And, unsurprisingly, the trouble begins again...

Donald makes quite a likeable narrator, and it's that word likeable which probably makes this novel so unusual. Donald does bizarre things: he takes an eight-year-old to a haunted house and reads to him; he seems to think it is his responsibility to look after this boy as, admittedly, nobody else is doing a particularly good job. Of course, the whole initial 'trouble' is his involvement in the death of a toddler. You should hate him. But I didn't. By the end of the novel, I felt an overwhelming sense of despair and sympathy for him. From the age of eight he was set on a path he didn't seem able to scrape himself back from. His turning over of 'the trouble' in later chapters was especially interesting: he seems unsure himself as to whether what happened was a genuine accident or something he did deliberately. Here is a novel which, far from judging a character who has committed one of the ultimate crimes in our society (a review I found online illustrated the article with that searing image of the Bulger killers) brings the reader onto his side. And that's disturbing, no doubt about it.

Towards the end, I lost a sense of the timescale a little, as Donald seemed able to travel about at will without anybody missing him. The introduction of another character was a little convenient and unrealistic, and the novel leaves the reader hanging at the end. I know why writers do this, but I've always felt it's a little lazy and a bit of a betrayal of the author-reader relationship. At least give me a solid ending and don't rely upon me to think one up myself; I'm starting to feel a little like Hazel and Augustus in The Fault in Our Stars as they try to find the true ending to their favourite novel.

I would say this was a more interesting concept than Luke and Jon, at least for me, but the ending was a little too abrupt for my liking.