Lionel Shriver: We Need to Talk about Kevin & Graham Gardner: Inventing Elliot

I have put these two books together as their common focus on children/young people visits, in very different ways and places, the darkest side of childhood and young life.

In Kevin we get an agonised insight into an almost unbelievable event (but not if you live in the USA) from the point of view of the mother, two years after it, as she pours out her heart to her estranged hisband in a series of searing letters, agonising over every little thing she did (or did not do ) as her son Kevin was growing up and agonising if she, somehow, was responsible for what he did.

She is ot a conventional maternal figure - and she is well aware of this and it is this which is the bruning sire which consumes her. Sometimes mothers do not love their children in the way that is automatically assumed and because of societal pressures, followed by the central event, she uses this to wonder if she was the cause.

The mother’s voice come through strongly (sounds obvious but this is not necessarily the case with all first-person narrations, is it) but we are convinced by it. but at the end there is a form of closure and it (might ) be possible to feel some optimism for the future.

the film with Tilda Swinton was, I recall, very powerful but one lost to a degree the personal POV and the sense of looknig back and self-evaluating and so the event itself was the climax - not bad in itself but, just not as impactful as the way of telling this story in the book.

With Elliot, the focus is much mroe on the world of the child and the pressures they are under in their often utterly unknown social lives (how much do we REALLY now about the lives of children at school - and I write this as a retired teacher…) - and these provide some sort of connection between the two books. It recalled for me Cormier’s The Chocolate War in its thoughtful exploration of group and societal pressures on the young and the effect that that can have on a developing mind.