Clay

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hornbeams, service trees, acacias and Turkey oaks with bristly acorn cups like little sea anemones. It was alive with squirrels, jays and wood mice, while in spring thrushes let off football rattles from the treetops, and every few summers stag beetles emerged to rear and fence and mate …“ And yet when the consequences of all those things played out I found that I was involved with these people and their lives, and I was moved by what happened. What to say about CLAY? I think Brent said it best: Frankenstein meets Demian, meets The Outsiders, with a twist of the old Golem story. David and his best friend Geordie have it pretty good...they steal scramental wine from the church and cigarettes from their dads. They run the neighborhood, looking out for Mouldy, the school bully. They lead a typical life, until Stephen Rose comes to town. The ending, sadly, was a let down, with most of the characters (or their lives) returning to how they were at the start. I really wish her editor had worked with her on this as I was bitterly disappointed that some characters had either failed to grow or society had prevented them from doing so which left me wondering what was the point? The juxtaposition of life in the park and life on the estate is striking, and the balance between the story of the human lives and the story of all that life in the park is very well judged.

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Sometimes the we-all-love-nature theme seemed forced. I suppose I want the information shared with me to be essential to the story. Not going a bit deeper into the characters - versus the setting - left some of them with little dimension. There were hints of dimension at times but not enough. Clay is a novel that connects three people through their love of being outside and of the small space within the centre of the city, a small park and the close by common. A small boy, a seventy eight year old woman and a man who dreams of his old farm in his home land, TC, Sophia and Jozef. They all go about their own ways, spending each day as it comes, whether its TC skipping school or Sophia writing her letters to her granddaughter or even Jozef spending his time between working and the park. They all have their own troubles, their own problems in the world that they shoulder themselves, but they are all aware of each other, the little bubbles of their world moving to cross within each other every so often, TC and Jozef more often than not. He is an author often suggested on National Curriculum reading lists in the United Kingdom and has attracted the attention of academics who specialise in the study of children's literature.

Davie and his best friend Geordie are just ordinary kids: altar boys, mediocre students, part of a gang full of mischief and rivalry. When Stephan Rose arrives, sent to live with his crazy Aunt Mary, because his father has died and his mother has gone mad, Father O’Mahoney asks that the boys befriend him. They resist, but Davie soon finds himself drawn to the strange new boy, fascinated as much with Stephan’s ability to create fantastic figures from clay as he is with Stephan’s taunting of Mouldy, the bully who’s vowed to ‘get’ Davie. Stephan has a gift, a real genius, for shaping figures that seem to live and breathe. He recognises something in Davie—some innocence, some goodness—that he can use, and begins to draw him into his plan. Together the boys create a monster from mud, a creature that not only lives but walks and obeys. Then something awful happens to Mouldy, and Davie must take action. The experience of reading Clay is like being in a dream. There are recognisable objects and familiar places, but everything is twisted round, suffused with the strange, the extraordinary, the downright miraculous.

Clay (novel) - Wikipedia

Then again, I'm not sure if anyone else thought this, too. I only really noticed this because it was so heavily contrasted with Davie's wonderful romantic evening with Maria. Nothing else in the story is developed from this, so it wasn't exactly relevant to the plot, other than Stephen perhaps trying to alienate Davie? Still, this isn't a great message. I really didn't understand that part, and it gave me a sour taste for the rest of the book. Its structure could be seen as a precursor to Reservoir 13, but concentrated into a smaller area and smaller time-span, without the mystery, and suburban, with a more definite conclusion. Jozef, is a middle-aged Polish immigrant who works in house clearances by day and in a takeaway by night; observing the small park as he mourns the farm he lost because he couldn’t deal with new EU regulations. He realises that TC is alone outside for far too long and he sees signs that he is hungry, so he tactfully offers him food and tries to he his friend.

Melissa Harrison’s first novel weaves together a human story of four people whose lives are changed when their paths cross with the story of the seasons changing in a city centre park that those four people all love. This is a terrific little book. Clay follows the lives of several lonely individuals who all find connections, both with each other and through the natural environment, that help them to recover from the losses in their lives. Set in London but with vivid descriptions of gardens and their inhabitants, both flora and fauna, the setting acts, perhaps not as a character but as a catalyst for change, a refuge and a way to connect with what is important in life. Daisy, Sophia’s granddaughter, lived in a much nicer area and she went to a private school. She loved to visit her grandmother, who was much more easy going that her mother, and she has come to share her grandmother’s love for seeds and insects and all the small things in nature that so many others failed to notice. But there were gaps. I didn’t understand why Linda’s daughter suddenly decided that gardening would be her consuming passion. I didn’t understand what made TC’s mother so very neglectful. Questions like that bothered me. I enjoyed it up until the very end, but I hated the relentlessly brutal ending. Harrison favors "realism" over hope, which I recognize is as valid an outlook as any, so this is an emotional response.