Martin Waddell, under the pseudonym Catherine Sefton, has also written about the
problems of growing up in Northern Ireland where the sectarian war is part of the
everyday background. Living with such accepted prejudice it is hard for adolescents to
form their own opinions and learn tolerance. In Island of the Strangers (1983) a group of
children from the city clash with a gang from the seaside town they are visiting. The
conflict is based on crude preconceptions. The resolution depends on the growing
maturity of the individual characters and their awareness that the individual may be
more important than a cause or belief.
Apartheid, like the threat of a nuclear holocaust, was a live issue for many teenagers
and traces of it will remain for many years to come. Toekey Jones’s Skindeep (1985) still
deserves reading as it exposes not only the well-documented gulfs within South African
society but also the hypocrisy and false thinking on which apartheid operated since the
friendship that develops between the two teenagers is ‘allowed’ because Dave is a ‘pass
White’. In Python Dance (1992) Norman Silver explores how Ruth, living as a privileged
White in 1960s Johannesburg, begins to question the assumptions of her background.
Stepping outside her own world she learns the grim truth of how the Blacks, whom she
has been brought up to despise, live.
As with apartheid, the extremism of General Pinochet’s regime in Chile exists no
longer but James Watson’s Talking in Whispers (1983) a fast-paced adventure story in
which Andres witnesses the ultimate in censorship—the burning of books —and plays
an important part in exposing the secret service’s shooting of an eminent opponent of
the junta, remains as a powerful reminder of an episode in Chile’s history and also as a
picture of any repressive regime at any time.
The wars that have most recently affected Britain directly have been used as source
material by Jan Needle and Robert Westall. Both exploit the particular to describe
something much greater: the realities of conflict as set against the propaganda that is
generated about them. Jan Needle set A Game of Soldiers (1985) in the Falklands War.
Sarah, Thomas and Michael come face to face with a wounded soldier and soon discover
the realities of the pain, fear and suffering of war which contrasts sharply with the
jingoistic patriotism that was being written about it at the time. Robert Westall did much
the same for the Gulf War, though with a quite different kind of story in Gulf (1992), in
which an English boy ‘turns into’ an Iraqi boy soldier.
Books of this kind pick up on teenagers’ commitment to issues that do not affect them
directly but which they know about superficially from newspaper and television
reporting. Contemporary domestic issues, too, have been treated seriously for teenagers
as in Ian Strachan’s Throwaways (1992) which describes the pathetic existence eked
out by children who have been abandoned by their parents because they can no longer
afford to feed them. Sky, Chip and Dig soon learn (as did Danny in Brother in the Land)
that integrity can and must survive against all odds if they are themselves to survive as
people rather than to merely exist. Robert Swindells’s Stone Cold (1993), with its central
theme of homelessness and its chilling account of the terrible dangers that the young
who live rough may encounter, gives insights into a world which it is all to easy to keep
at arm’s length.
Like readers of all ages, teenagers need a mixture of fictions to sustain their literary
interests. Self-knowledge is a spur to growth, but so too is a wider understanding of the
TEENAGE FICTION: REALISM, ROMANCES, CONTEMPORARY PROBLEM NOVELS 391