Hot and bothered: Trouble Was, by Charlotte Edwardes, reviewed

Child narrators are tricky little beasts. Misjudge their vocabulary and they lose all credibility or are unreadably twee. Even the brightest young minds can’t penetrate the nuance of adult life, which limits their perspective and reliability. That, though, can be a positive in the right hands. Throw them into an unstable family (show me a stable fictional family?) and they really start pulling their weight.

Enter Frank Dart, Charlotte Edwardes’s first-person protagonist in Trouble Was, her debut novel. He is nine years old, something Edwardes makes us work out for ourselves, which is a neat taster of everything Frank has to figure out for himself. The narrative opens on ‘the edge of Exmoor, the perilous crossing’, the italics being Frank’s way of denoting words specific to the adult world. His mother, Cynthia, is driving the four of them – four-year-old Odette and Patrick, the baby, are asleep in the back – plus Reggie the dog to their aunt’s house in north Devon.

‘We were insulated inside the Citroën. So close it made my job of looking after us easier,’ writes Frank, those two short sentences saying so little and yet so much. ‘I didn’t know why we were going to my aunt’s but it wasn’t the first time we had stuffed the car with our cases until the boot wouldn’t shut.’

Aunt Perry is Frank’s father’s sister; he is ‘away at sea’. Far from being a lucky bolthole, Perry’s farmhouse is a horror show: freezing on their arrival, boiling in the roasting summer to come. It’s 1976, midway through a decade when walloping kids with the back of a hairbrush and free-spirited neglect counted as standard parenting. Perry’s own trio are sadistic bullies who bear the psychological scars of their own father’s absence.

In one sense, not much happens in Trouble Was, which wraps up when the heatwave breaks, at the end of the summer. Frank longs for school, goes to school, and then the holidays start. The drama is in the detail, and it’s here that the book comes alive, Frank’s child’s-eye narration perfectly suited to capturing the specificity of every tiny detail. Similes are almost tangibly good: ‘Because of the humidity, sleep felt like being underwater in a gluey pond.’ Eschewing speech marks has a two-pronged effect: intensifying the claustrophobia of Edwardes’s prose and putting the reader more firmly in her young protagonist’s mind. 

As the mercury soars, tempers boil. It takes Odette to push Cynthia to breaking point. ‘“Daddy doesn’t like you”, Odette said. “That’s why he’s not coming back.”’ That this terrific debut closes with a rainbow after the storm is either its one flaw or Frank misreading the situation. Edwardes leaves you to decide.