A friend of the talented Storyteller (once blogger extraordinaire, now busy planning her wedding!), Fisher-Frank has just had her first novel published. I went along to the bookshop where she was nervously handling her first signing event and she was lovely. I promptly bought Losing Agir, even though teen fiction is not normally on my reading radar. Fisher-Frank has already had a highly successful career as a children’s rights solicitor, representing children in care and campaigning for young people to have easier access to legal representation. Fisher-Frank’s husband represented the inhabitants of a Turkish village against the country itself after a horrendous crime that is the backbone of the book’s narrative. The biggest piece of oft quoted writing advice is ‘write about what you know’ and Fisher-Frank certainly does this, giving the novel a gritty realism.
The story focuses on 15 year old Alice, a long time cog in the care machine, being housed with a creepy couple called Tom and Glenda Martin. As well as Alice, the Martins are also fostering a young Turkish lad, Agir. Alice is immediately attracted to and intrigued by Agir and she begins to notice that he and Tom have some secret connection. What exactly is Agir being coerced to do and can Alice help the young Turk to smash a human trafficking ring? As well as this, what are the horrible traumatic events in the past of the pair of young teens?
Where Fisher-Frank scores highly is in the novel’s plotting; Losing Agir races along with plenty of incident and gives us a grim and gritty tale straight from the newspapers that has the ring of authenticity throughout. This is no fairytale but a story of two highly disadvantaged children struggling to survive within the bureaucracy of a huge machine that, while well meaning, is open to abuse and corruption. Despite having a social worker, Frances, Alice is pretty much on her own and at the mercy of Tom, a monster of a man. The story takes in a whole raft of themes. From domestic abuse (Glenda is doped up on drugs to avoid facing up to her role as battered wife), suicide, alienation, legal rights and tentative love.
As its backdrop the story uses the real life massacre at Ormanici in the Kurdish region of South-Eastern Turkey. Believing the village to contain possible rebel army soldiers, Turkish forces carried out a brutal morning raid which Fisher-Frank conveys effectively in her opening chapter:
“A deafening blast lifted Agir from his feet and hurled him, like a tennis ball, through the air until he landed hard onto his brother’s small body. Sounds, so loud, so foreign to any he had heard before, reverberated through his head as stones and rubble crashed onto his skull and back. Dust clogged his nose as he lifted his head and tried to breathe. Though his ears were caked in dirt and debris, a high pitched wailing scream of pain made its way through his head.â€
As you can see, Fisher-Frank has a knack for description and the Turkish flashbacks are probably the best sections of the novel and doubly compelling as we know it is based on fact (the people of Ormancici took Turkey to the European Court of Human Rights, winning their case in 2004).
While in terms of story and plot, Fisher-Frank is assured, her characters have a tendency to be a little too black and white, especially for such a realistic story as this. Apart from some astute touches in describing the nice but permanently harassed Frances (a character who bounces fully formed from the page), the cast fall mainly into the white hats and black hats. Fisher-Frank also has a tendency to go a little overboard with her descriptions of the principal villains, making them appear as some kind of Roald Dahl creation as drawn by Quentin Blake. Tom and his duplicitous social worker sister come off especially as grotesques, the sister being described thus:
“She waddled her large, heavy, overweight frame, just about covered, in a tight orange suit, over to where they sat. As she smiled, the thick, creamy foundation plastered on her face cracked a little around the mouth. Her bright red lipstick had smudged so badly over her large, oversized lips that her mouth had the look of a wild animal, with a face dripping with blood as it finished a meal of raw meat. At the sight of her, if the boys weren’t already traumatised, they soon would be.â€
At best, this lacks subtlety and at worst gives the impression that outer appearances reflect what’s inside. How much more effective it might have been had Tom or his sister been good looking and charming, hiding a rotten core. Alice, our heroine, can also be a little wet at times, mooning over the mysterious Agir; however, she comes into her own towards the end of the book and is rightfully crucial to the tale’s resolution.
Fisher-Frank is, however, only starting her writing journey and, on the whole, I was impressed by Losing Agir and would happily read the next novel she writes. Children’s fiction that doesn’t shy away from the horrors of the real world is to be encouraged and applauded. Finally, if you’d like to see the novelist explain her story directly to you, you can watch a number of short presentations following the link below:
http://vimeo.com/tag:losingagir
Fisher-Frank is passionate and articulate about her work and, should such things help sway you, very easy on the eye.
GK Rating: ***
The Blog of Delights
No comments:
Post a Comment