Family secrets

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.

‘Back then, of course, I didn’t know my parents were locked into an impossibility even greater than mine. That I was living in a crime scene.’ So writes the narrator 48 years after the strange events that unfold in this bitter, brief, shattering novel. But what was the crime? Is the narrator the victim? Is her controlling mother’s hysteria over perfectly normal adolescent exploits explained by the fact that the father had abused his daughter? Is the narrator in truth Vigdis Hjorth? And is this book then the Norwegian novelist’s harrowing memoir? Is autofiction really fact in a cunning mask? Is all fiction waiting to be decoded into reality? Like the police, Hjorth doesn’t do answers.