It’s the start of a fairly straightforward plotline that involves solving the mystery that tortures both Charlie and Jasper, but it’s also the start of Charlie’s own coming of age – a more complicated story about love, prejudice, and the making of a meaningful life that has an air of nostalgia bedded into it – as if the narrator were recounting his story from an older reflective distance.
For a bookworm like Charlie, an association with Jasper is both terrifying and titillating. One summer evening, Jasper knocks on Charlie’s window, urging him out to help him deal with a horrible crime that Jasper fears he will be held responsible for. He’s the town’s scapegoat – a half caste who sleeps rough and is blamed whenever something goes missing. Jasper Jones is the local tough boy – “a Thief, a Liar, a Thug, a Truant’. Charlie is a character that is both extraordinary and ordinary – a boy that is utterly recognisable as he tries to come to terms with the terrible situation he finds himself in. For some children that loss of childhood may come later, but the roots tend to be right there, at the testosterone rich edge of the teen years when you are simultaneously understanding, and struggling with everything: emotions, authority, expectations, relationships. Charlie Bucktin is a young boy at that wonderful and terrible age where youth and maturity are both fighting equally for supremacy. My son actually read this book before me, and when I said this to him, he responded in agreement. I don’t think I’ve seen that insulting macho warmth captured so well before in literature. Charlie and his friend Jeffery speak in a way that is so redolent of my own thirteen year old son’s conversations with his friends that it was almost shocking. The first thing that struck me while reading Jasper Jones was the authenticity of the dialogue.
0 kommentar(er)
