Bookclub - The Outcast by Sadie Jones

Editor's note: This episode of Bookclub is available from Sunday 3 August and will be available to listen online or for download.

At first glance, the Sam Mendez film American Beauty doesn’t have much to do with the leafy commuter towns of Surrey, but talking to Sadie Jones about her novel The Outcast, I found it a natural shift.

The transition from dark domestic doings in the emptiness of an American dormitory town to the stifling conventions of the Home Counties in the 1950s turned out to be a natural one.

Sadie’s novel is about what lies beneath the surface of a ‘normal’ life and through her central character, Lewis, she examines the pain that’s often part of adolescence.‘

It had to be the fifties,’ she told our readers. ‘In thinking about putting him now, I thought – there’s the internet, grief counselling, there’s medication…and I needed to express his inner landscape in the book and there seemed nowhere more isolating than nineteen-fifties Surrey for a teenage boy.’

She went on to say that it was the decade when we held our breath – between the cataclysm of war and its immediate aftermath and the social explosion of the sixties. It fascinated her, and Lewis is our guide through the years when he couldn’t talk to his father about the war, when he found it difficult to fit in and be loved, and when he sets fire to a church in an assault that one of our readers described as ‘an attack on the moral and social heart of nineteen fifties suburban Britain.’

We can certainly understand his pain. Gilbert, his father, can’t escape from his wartime experiences to talk frankly to his son, and Lewis is troubled. He succumbs to self-harm, to sexual exploits with his step-mother, and the more he thrashes around, the more he feels alone.

At the start of the book, before Lewis takes us back to his youth, we know that he’s been in prison, so from the beginning we’re prepared for a rough journey. His mother dies in a drowning accident, and from then on the society around him seems to become more and more rotten. He doesn’t want to destroy it, just to find a place in it – but again and again he sees himself failing.

But those who haven’t read The Outcast shouldn’t be misled by that. It isn’t a novel that leads to despair. Lewis does seem to be in a spiral that leads him down – he’s always falling for another temptation – but as his friend Kit says of him that he’s ‘completely of the light, he’s not a dark person.’ This is the central conundrum of the book. Lewis, though he often behaves badly and ends up carrying out a crime, is neither bad enough nor weak enough to appear to deserve his fate. We want him to do better, and probably assume that if he hadn’t been born a stockbroker’s son he would have been happier all round. That, however, was his lot.

But there’s hope. Sadie told us that when Lewis went to London – he visits a jazz club as a fifteen-year-old – he found it as broken as he was but found in the ruins the seeds of the sixties. ‘And that’s his future,’ she said.

Someone asked how Lewis would be today, in his seventies. Sadie said that even if she knew what was going to happen, she didn’t want to be told. ‘I think it would destroy a thing that you’ve made yourself.’ But our readers concluded that Lewis would probably be happy. I agree.

I hope you enjoy the programme with Sadie Jones. Next month, we’ll be recording in Edinburgh, during festival month, and I’m glad to say we’ll be talking about one of my favourite modern novels, A Question of Loyalties by Allan Massie. If you want to come apply now.

Happy reading….Jim

Jim Naughtie is the presenter Bookclub on BBC Radio 4

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