Deadkidsongs
The title tells us what to expect: It is about 4 blond boys in a Seventies English provincial town in a Gang run on militaristic lines, with a command structure. They look up to the father of one of the boys known as 'The Best Father', a sadistic bully and abuser. They despise another who really is the best, a pinko peacenik type. There are the grandparents to one of Gang who reminded me a lot of the elderly couple in Raymond Briggs's When the Wind Blows. How much is real is open to question, I think. I, too, had a chip pan fire incident when left in charge as a young teenager, was obsessed with war stories of Battle of Britain fighter pilots and prison camp escapes.
I remember being terrified of imminent nuclear destruction, the risible Protect and Survive booklet issued by the UK government, the horror of rabbits deliberately infected with myxomatosis. The Seventies backdrop is brilliantly realised.
- deadkidsongs, Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath, review.
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- Deadkidsongs: Theatre Royal, Bath.
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To be honest I don't have much confidence I understand what was really going on and would have gone back to re-read the novel if not for the fact I don't want to put myself through the experience again, so I will remain uncertain. This is a novel that wants you to consider what you are reading and then rethink that as you go on and have more information, and then again at the ending which is pretty much calculated to send you back to the beginning! This is not to say I regret reading the novel, I just wish it were easier to forget the images it has planted in my head, sadness over the horror inflicted upon children by adults in their lives that leads to a cycle of violence and abuse.
Jun 05, Kim rated it it was amazing Shelves: Wow, this is a book which will invoke strong reactions. You will love it or hate it; I cannot imagine anyone being meh about this book Imagine if the Secret Seven and Lord of the Flies had a baby, and that baby hung out at The Wasp Factory and maybe chatted to Stephen King — this book is that baby. It tells the story of a summer of four friends, known as Gang. Four almost teenager, not yet hitting puberty fully but feeling its edges, boys who think they are little men.
Boys with the arrogance of y Wow, this is a book which will invoke strong reactions. Boys with the arrogance of youth and the strength of blind courage.
Observer review: deadkidsongs by Toby Litt | Books | The Guardian
Boys with some screwed up ideas with no adults who are managing to monitor or control them. Boys on a road to devastation and destruction. As an adult reader I could see where these kids were going, watch them hurtling towards the brick wall of reality, and was unable to stop them, or stop myself reading and wincing.
The book is set mid Cold War so I imagine these kinds of war games were quite common. However, these boys, this Gang, was a perfect storm of parental absences, charismatic peers and general boredom. And bored, disgruntled, parent hating teenagers are a dangerous lot. Add in death, fear and internal bullying and you really do have the setting for some twisted behaviour.
It is also included in the blurb that of the four of them, only two survive. As an adult I was quite shocked at myself hoping for one, and then another, boy to be the one to die. Do the unlikeable deserve to die more than the likable? This is a question raised both in me, through my reactions to the boys, and the book, through their decisions and behaviours. I was glad to wake in the middle of the night because it meant I could read a few more pages. This book, the first in ages, literally kept me up at night, either reading it or thinking about it.
It is not for the fainthearted, but if you like your stories gritty and real, and unputdownable, then this book is for you. I think it is brilliant Oct 22, Twan rated it it was amazing. Iv'e been meaning to read this since I cut a review of it out of a paper about 10years back, spotted it by accident in the library and picked it up. It really was worth the wait, a brilliant novel following the summer of Gang, four lads larking about playing army and practicing their defences incase the Ruskies attack. What starts off as a fun coming of age tale soon starts to spiral out of control into much murkier territory as the lads plot and plan revenge for the wrongs that happen to them.
A great study on youngsters, parenting and erm, torture. Aug 01, Deborah rated it it was amazing.
This is probably my favourite book of all time. It's dark, violent and disturbing and speaks with an authentic voice of childhood - innocent, knowing, cruel and frightened, all at the same time. The menacing character, the 'best father' still haunts my dreams. Jun 07, Bridget rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: When I finished this book, I had to leave my apartment and go visit with this friend of mine who was singularly annoying and beyond mundane. We spent 4 hours talking and eating dinner.
I still went home with the shivers, completely freaked out by the last 30 pages. Sep 17, Djecak rated it it was amazing. First time I read this book, I was 14 years old. Somehow, it got to my hands, and I had no clue what was it about. It shocked me, the plot, the ending, and most of all the fact that main characters were the kids my age. My perspective and book-reading experience dramatically changed from childish innocence in literature to harsh and cruel slap of reality I wasn't ready for, contained in Deadkidsongs.
I can say that this book was turning point to my view of literature, and life in general. On my 2 First time I read this book, I was 14 years old. On my 21st birthday, my girlfriend bought me this book. It took me a year before I read it again sorry Anna: After years of reading experience, I wondered what It would be like reading this book that amused me as a kid, will I be disappointed and will it shake those fundations that it implemented in me?
Behind the rhododendrons, crazy kids
I was so wrong. This book is still my favourite. But, now, I admire things that I overlooked reading it as a child. First of all, brilliance of Toby Litt's writing. Switching narrative from third-person point of view to first-person of not one, but four different boys telling one story, with deliberate contradictions coming from their individual characters, and guiding them to inevitable doom that you know is there, but you can't stop reading is glorious.
There are many social themes that intertwine this masterpiece. Cold war, PTSD, abuse, rape, homosexuality, animal abuse, murder, dehumanization of kids, violence, wrong values etc. Narrator doesn't put them out on the open like that, some of them are hidden in short sentences and simple streams of consciousness of one of the characters, and all of them mixed together culminate to one of the most brutal and darkest inevitable endings of modern literature.
I found this book quite disturbing in parts, particularly the events in the morgue. In all honesty I couldn't say I "enjoyed" the book. Despite that, it never crossed my mind to give up on it Oct 02, Fangface rated it really liked it. Echoes of our beastly childhood mindsets. This book works quite well as a study of the psychological ripple effect of domestic trauma and of innocence corrupted. It is well written and has an interesting narrative structure, with multiple narrators speaking in both first and third person.
It also works as a very dark black comedy for large stretches of the book. I guess my only problem is that when the unpleasantness starts, it gets very unpleasant indeed. Often the truly awful things are only hinted at, or only the aftermath is described, which somehow makes it all the worse in the imagination of the reader.
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I found myself racing through this book just to see if my worst fears about what would happen would be realised. I won't spoil the ending, but let's just say that by then there has been a great deal of nastiness that leaves a rather sour aftertaste that lingers long after the book has been put down. If that sounds like your cup of tea, then this book has much to recommend it.
Just don't say you weren't warned HanGerg Jul 4, Please don't read Deadkidsongs, Litt's third novel about four little boys who form a gang, unless you have a very strong stomach. It certainly makes you want to ask what kind of warped imagination comes up with a story as violent as this? I actually read much of it in the back of taxis and nearly caused an accident a couple of times when I screamed out loud. I feel the book must owe something to Lord of the Flies. Home Groups Talk Zeitgeist. The 12 Days of LT scavenger hunt is going on.
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Gang resolves to have its revenge by killing the grandparents, slowly and subtly and, above all, without suspicion falling on its members, just as their proto-Maquis training has taught them. But now the cracks start to appear, cracks whose methodological arguments mask an increasingly insidious moral whisper, less heard of course by one than another.
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Litt takes us spinning through this crazy kids' world at a cracking page-flipping pace, sustaining the tension by reiterating incidents from the different, but not so different, points of view of Gang members. Continuity suffers sometimes, perhaps more than can be explained by differing perceptions of character. And sometimes the facts within the fiction appear wildly wrong - a Morris Traveller does not have four passenger doors so an entire sequence simply could not have happened; a second lieutenant is senior to a sergeant, something the boys would have known instinctively, while a sub-lieutenant being a naval rank is off the scale.
But these, among other solecisms, are quibbles with what is an immensely spirited work, whose moral melodies linger long after the last page is turned. Is it really about childhood?