posted on 23 Jan 2019

Lark by Anthony McGowan

Anthony McGowan’s highly regarded trilogy of books, Brock, Pike and Rook introduced us to the brothers Nicky and Kenny and their adventures in these individual volumes have now been collected together as a single anthology called The Truth of Things. Now we have a fourth, Lark, which acts as a sort of coda or even a full stop to the story of the two boys.

I should at this point warn you that Lark is a powerful and emotional roller-coaster of a book and anyone reading it for the first time will find themselves unable to put it down until its finished. It’s just over a hundred pages or so in Barrington Stokes’ admirable and accessible format but behind it is a huge hinterland where the complex inner story of the two boys is set in the unforgiving landscape of the moors.

As Nicky and Kenny try and kill time waiting to see the mum for the first time in years, their dad suggests they take a trip out to the moors to walk off their pent-up energy and to see the beautiful views. And there just might be a chance to hear the larks that used to be so common but which are slowly dying out in the city environment:

“I looked at Kenny. His eyes were shining as he saw the larks soaring up into the blue sky of his mind…”

So with Tina, their faithful old dog, a bag of sandwiches, a rather useless Google map and entirely the wrong clothes they set off on the three-bus journey to their starting point.  All well and good until the weather suddenly takes a turn for the worse – rain and then snow turn the moors into an unforgiving wilderness. The freezing cold closes in and the boys realise they are in trouble. Should they back-track or push on and find a shortcut back to the road?

But the weather just gets worse and soon the boys have lost their way – which is bad enough in itself – and then things take an even more dangerous turn as their battle for survival literally becomes a matter of life and death. Will they all get out alive?

Well not surprisingly, I’m not telling. Find out for yourself. If you do, and you’d be mad not to, you’ll discover that there’s also a short epilogue that draws the adventures of Nicky and Kenny to its conclusion.

McGowan’s writing is wonderful here. He evokes the landscape with an intense sense of three-dimensional reality and the onset of the snow is tangible and visceral – I was shivering just reading the story. The boys and their actions are utterly believable and if you’re the type who gets emotionally wrapped up in a story, you’re going to need to have a handkerchief at hand by the end.

It’s undoubtedly a shame that there will be no more stories in this series but this is a wonderful way to go out.

Very highly recommended.

 

Terry Potter

January 2019