Michael Amherst’s startling debut opens with a quiet description of the unnamed, unmistakably English town in which the novel’s action takes place. Amherst’s narrator is a faithful tour guide, keen that we don’t miss the preparatory school, where the headteacher is the father of our 12-year-old protagonist, Daniel, or the abbey with its Norman tower. Three rivers traverse the town and every winter they “break their banks and flood the surrounding fields” so that all becomes “hemmed in and dark with water”. Throughout this taut bildungsroman, threats of inundation appear regularly, powerfully underlining the pressures to contain the self and the desire for freedom integral to Daniel’s development.
Amherst’s Daniel is a richly realised child protagonist. The novel’s enigmatic title carries with it a sense of innocence before experience, and, indeed, young Daniel is rather green. He has a charming, wide-eyed callowness – “receiving a new exercise book was one of his chief joys” – and cannot imagine being as old as the 13-year-old choristers. But, skilfully, Amherst makes him so much more than this. Daniel is contrary: in his ruminations about theology, masculinity and the nature of storytelling, he is preternaturally attuned to complexity, the “double storied mystery” of existence (to borrow a phrase from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, which gives this novel its epigraph). He is deeply serious, artistic, “sickly”, prideful, endlessly questioning, knowingly precocious and prone to fabulously funny delusions of grandeur. At one point he wonders, quite po-faced, if he “might be Jesus”. Elsewhere he berates himself for having not yet finished his first musical score, given that Mozart did so when he was just four.
