Michael Amherst’s startling debut opens with a quiet description of the unnamed, unmistakably English town in which the novel’s action takes place. Amherst’s narrator is a faithful tour guide, keen that we don’t miss the preparatory school, where the headteacher is the father of our 12-year-old protagonist, Daniel, or the abbey with its Norman tower. Three rivers traverse the town and every winter they “break their banks and flood the surrounding fields” so that all becomes “hemmed in and dark with water”. Throughout this taut bildungsroman, threats of inundation appear regularly, powerfully underlining the pressures to contain the self and the desire for freedom integral to Daniel’s development.
Amherst’s Daniel is a richly realised child protagonist. The novel’s enigmatic title carries with it a sense of innocence before experience, and, indeed, young Daniel is rather green. He has a charming, wide-eyed callowness – “receiving a new exercise book was one of his chief joys” – and cannot imagine being as old as the 13-year-old choristers. But, skilfully, Amherst makes him so much more than this. Daniel is contrary: in his ruminations about theology, masculinity and the nature of storytelling, he is preternaturally attuned to complexity, the “double storied mystery” of existence (to borrow a phrase from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, which gives this novel its epigraph). He is deeply serious, artistic, “sickly”, prideful, endlessly questioning, knowingly precocious and prone to fabulously funny delusions of grandeur. At one point he wonders, quite po-faced, if he “might be Jesus”. Elsewhere he berates himself for having not yet finished his first musical score, given that Mozart did so when he was just four.
Amherst’s unusual, crisp and finely calibrated style elevates Daniel’s childhood experiences. We follow his anxious inner life throughout a period bracketed by two significant external changes. First, his hapless father loses his headship at the prep school and the family move from the only home Daniel has known. As the novel closes, Daniel is about to make the terrifying ascent to the unknown world of senior school. Between these poles, in episodic chapters that often have the texture of parables, Daniel tries to better understand himself, the institutions – home, school and to a lesser extent, church – and people around him.
Daniel’s wistful mother is a “great beauty” and failed actor who claims to see spirits and “believes dragons are to be found in the Malvern Hills”. She’s also susceptible to bouts of depression; Daniel’s father responds to these by spending longer and longer in the village pub. The disarray and shame his mother’s illness prompts leads Daniel to sometimes candidly wonder if “it would be easier if [she] were dead”.
In both life and fiction, when the familial setting provides little security, the comforting rhythms of school can offer solace. Initially, Daniel’s schooldays are brightened by his classmate Philip. While Daniel is crudely perceived by his peers as “a prig, a swot, a goody-goody and a show-off”, handsome Philip is precisely portrayed by Amherst as Daniel’s “other impossible self”, a Jungian shadow embodying abundant social prowess and ease. There is a burgeoning camaraderie between the two, even if the friendship is deeply imbalanced and pungent with Daniel’s longing, and a jealousy that calls to mind the implications of the novel’s title. To begin with, this bond between Philip and the protagonist is encouraged by the suavely eccentric art master, Mr Miller, and he selects the two of them for private art classes.
But, as with Miss Brodie and her elevated “set”, Mr Miller’s cruelties and caprice – labelling Daniel a “genius” one day and a “Mummy’s boy” the next, queasily drawing attention to his lack of “sex appeal” – make it impossible to ascertain what’s required to maintain the teacher’s favour. It’s approval Daniel hungers for, and prefers much more than the advances of the strange man at the pub who insists on patting his bottom.
Equally bewildering, and desperately sad too, is the dissolution of the closeness between Daniel and Philip, which shakes Daniel’s belief in his singular “greatness” and promise. As puberty beckons, Daniel approaches it with a heartbreaking sense of his own lack of worthiness and a subtly explicated dread that his emerging queerness will be another isolating challenge to reckon with.
While Amherst offers us a perceptive and closely detailed examination of a unique child’s consciousness, the novel is really concerned with what Daniel comes to discover is at the heart of adulthood. Adulthood seems to him a “resolute and uncaring” state. And Daniel, with his judgmental mien and superiority complexes, his self-loathing and worries about his insufficient masculinity, his sense that his family’s frailties are for him to mend, cares profoundly – and suffers the lack of reciprocity painfully. In the middle of the novel, he beseeches, “Won’t anyone look after me?”
In the eponymous biblical story, Cain is marked or cursed for his crimes against God, and against his brother. As this exquisitely written novel reaches its brave and elliptical final sequence, we’re left wondering if Daniel is cursed to bear, for life, his unique sensitivity in an unfeeling world. Or if, adapting to the norms of adulthood, he will become just as unfeeling himself.
• The Boyhood of Cain is published by Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
