Flight of fancy - Lost Boys by James Miller

Published on Thursday 31 July 2008 13:15

THIS IS A GENRE-DEFYING DEBUT. It casts a spell. But its brave ambition over-reaches itself and distracts, dispersing its gaze in too many directions.

James Miller's epigraph quotes J M Barrie's Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens: "He distinctly remembered … that he had lain in bed planning to escape as soon as his mother was asleep …"

In Miller's novel the singular Peter becomes a worrying multiplicity of boys, a flock preparing to fly the coop, summoned mysteriously to a parallel otherworldly realm. Meanwhile, a menacing sense of doomsday (more mood than reality) gathers force in the novel's background. I couldn't help thinking of Hitchcock's The Birds.

Miller conjures all this beautifully, insinuating a policeman with Captain Hook tendencies and a figure resembling Tinkerbell. But he opens with a flashback into the darkness of an oil employee, the hapless Arthur Dashwood, a decent, ordinary man who is kidnapped in Baghdad.

Who were his kidnappers? What did they want and what did he give them to prompt his release? During his debriefing Arthur maintains he has divulged nothing. His employers send him back to England along with his family who have been living in Saudi Arabia, but it provides a less comforting world than they might have expected, a different test.

The Dashwoods' son Timothy is dispatched to a public school where he is bullied. His little brother is kept at home. Tim immerses himself in the fantasy world of computer games. He and Edward, his only friend, are called "f**king queers". And they share a dream.

In the dream a boy sits in a treetop. Always it's summer. Always he beckons, puts his flute to his lips and plays ... "such a sharp and endless yearning in the light rise of those notes ... one day they would fly away together".

Sharing the dream becomes their comfort; it deepens the bond and becomes like the warzone games on computer, a place of escape in which the border between reality and fantasy is blurred.

This private world is mirrored by Arthur Dashwood's office life, a humdrum place of procedures and routines, and by Mrs Dashwood's banal domestic isolation. Then we learn that some boys at the school have been disappearing, with no explanation, and all without trace. It seems the dream is not just the possession of Edward and Tim. In truth the dream possesses them.

There is no suspense here. We know the boys will enter that otherness, that the parents will be bereaved and newspaper headlines will blazon alarm across front pages. Dream and nightmare are set in tandem. Miller's problem is that the boys have disappeared from the narrative surface, leaving the angst of the adult aftermath, and the book is just one third done.

Here fantasy-horror meets detective story meets tragedy of manners as the Dashwoods crack and mope and the hunt for the boys, now numbering dozens, veering towards hundreds, gets underway. Arthur engages a private sleuth and the meaty middle of the novel is much consumed with Arthur listening, in private, to the contents of the tape reports made by Buxton the hot-shot gumshoe.

Arthur believes Tim's disappearance may be an act of revenge or spite on the part of "people I might have crossed". Then come the emails – ostensible signals, written at length, thoughtful, sophisticated, yet innocent: "If you saw us now your eyes would not recognise what they witnessed … My skin is darker than before and each day it gets darker still. We wear the robes of battle … We are all here." These "noises off" may be real or dreamed or wish-fulfilment. But, as with the rest of the book, they raise questions rather than answers.

The boys may be massing to fight a war, meanwhile the surveillance society seeks them through its lenses, as increasingly they may pose a threat, perceived or real. You feel James Miller is raising issues rather than characters and that the Dashwoods, while their distress is made believable, are caught up in a situation so fantastic the elasticity of the reader's disbelief becomes over-stretched. The novel's apocalyptic ending won't bear the weight of its own despair. It is simply writing, a little scherzo of doom-laden words that fly into the air.

LOST BOYS BY JAMES MILLER Little Brown, 275pp, 12.99 pbk