The Outcast by Sadie Jones
The Outcast, Sadie Jones’s debut novel, was published in 2008 to wide critical acclaim. Her second, Small Wars, was published last year to an equally good reception.
I’ve been meaning to read both for a while: their mid-century settings and post-war subject matter appealed as much as their attractively retro-styled book covers.
However, it wasn’t until gifted The Outcast by a friend last week that I finally got round to reading Ms Jones’s first novel.
Just after the end of the Second World War, the powerful bond between seven year old Lewis and his mother is disrupted by the return of his father from active service. Lewis is sent to boarding school, and his mother starts to lose her days in a haze of loneliness and furtive drinking as she waits for her husband to return from work.
Three years later tragic events in the local wood devastate the family. Lewis is the only witness and at barely ten years old struggles to articulate what he has seen, both to himself and to the rest of the community.
Nine years later and Lewis returns home after a two year spell in Brixton prison for a crime which has made him the titular outcast of the title. Waiting for him is fifteen year old Kit who has long been an outsider in both her own home and with the other local children.
Set in a stiflingly close home counties village, fraught with class distinctions and unspoken emotions, it’s a intense debut. Sadie Jones started her literary career writing screenplays and the novel carries a filmic, immediate punch. It’s very readable and evokes both the emotional and physical upheaval caused to families and individuals by the return of battle-scarred soldiers after VE day. The day to day strains of this period are touched upon without emphasising too strongly the nylons, chewing gum and metal tins of peaches cliche of rationing. It has an inherent dark romance that keeps the reader fixated from the first page.
The Outcast is an excellent first novel, with broad appeal, and I am eager to start her second. Long may Sadie Jones stand up for outcasts…
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