Author explores relationships and time
Tidy, abrupt resolutions hobble Book’s plot, But Chalk Man delivers solid entertainment
The Chalk Man C.J. Tudor Doubleday Canada
Kids of 12, wandering aimlessly together in pre-adolescent restlessness, are open to all sorts of happy or unhappy adventures, and England’s C.J. Tudor has created five representatives of the species to go exploring through her first crime novel.
The Chalk Man’s gang of four boys and one girl live in a relatively small, relatively dull English town, and in 1986 have devised, as children will, a little society of their own.
To communicate proposed activities and destinations, they mark little chalk stick figures in various poses as messages to each other.
It’s the sort of code whose entertainment value could wear off in a short time — except that one day, following chalk figures into the nearby woods, they discover parts of a dismembered body, a girl not many years older than they are.
In the official search that follows, authorities uncover everything but the girl’s head. That’s never discovered — a fact revealed by Eddie Adams, the boy-become-man who narrates the events of both 1986 and the results, for just about everyone, in 2016.
Eddie’s father is a precariously placed freelance writer. His mother, a doctor who runs an abortion clinic — not that at 12, Eddie initially understands that.
Fat Gav’s family owns a local pub. Hoppo is fatherless, his mother a cleaning woman. Metal Mickey, so-called because of the braces on his teeth, is a surly lad from a troubled family, and Nicky, the group’s only girl, is the rebellious daughter of a vicious local cleric who leads a fervent band of anti-abortion protesters.
There are obvious conflicts between Eddie’s and Nicky’s families, but other local aggravations aren’t as clear-cut. Nor, to the kids, are the varied circumstances and tensions of the adults around them.
Thirty years later, Hoppo is a plumber, Fat Gav runs the pub his parents once owned, Metal Mickey left town years back, and Eddie himself is a teacher, and from the evidence, something of a hoarder.
No one knows where Nicky’s living. An attack on her brutal father, about whom there were hints of abuse, left him incapable when she was still a teen, and her previously absent mother arrived to fetch her and take her into another life.
The fate of Nicky’s father hasn’t been the only violent episode. Thanks to an accident in a car driven by Metal Mickey, Fat Gav’s legs have been paralyzed for years. Mickey’s violent older brother apparently drowned in the local river, but not before a nasty attack on Eddie.
Besides the two time frames, the novel juggles other major characters, not least a teacher, deemed to suffer from albinism because of his extreme pallor, whose reputation is eventually ruined because of his affections for a young girl.
Like the characters drawn on sidewalks, fences and trees, he, too, is known as the Chalk Man.
The novel’s portrayal of a band of kids hanging out together despite multiple differences, and who and how they are, changed and unchanged, three decades later, is an entertaining, worthwhile exploration.
The downside is that the book’s various entanglements, injuries and fatalities add up to an awful lot of complex leaps and surprising relationships, and that ultimately leads to abrupt resolutions which, however odd and however tidy, haven’t quite been earned.