Kit de Waal has already garnered praise and attention for her short fiction. She worked in family and criminal law for many years, and wrote training manuals on fostering and adoption; she also grew up with a mother who fostered children. This helps explain the level of insight and authenticity evident in My Name Is Leon, her moving and thought-provoking debut novel.
It is set in the early 1980s and, like What Maisie Knew and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is told through the perspective of a child who is keenly observant, although we understand more of what is happening around him than he does. In this case, the narrator is eight-year-old Leon, who becomes a foster child. The novel begins with the birth of his baby brother, Jake. Immediately we realise that there is something wrong with their mother, Carol. Rather than cradle the child she has just given birth to, she leaves the hospital room to have a cigarette. The nurse leaves too and tells Leon, “If he starts crying, you come and fetch me. OK?” Leon is left on his own with Jake. The novel is full of quietly shocking moments like this, which reveal how much child protection has moved on from 30 years ago.
The brothers have different, and absent, fathers. While Carol and Jake are white, Leon is mixed race. His father, Byron, is in prison, while Jake’s father, Tony, has rejected Carol and their child. Home is on an estate near a dual carriageway. Carol often leaves her boys alone in the flat when she goes out.
When Carol has a nervous breakdown and falls into a catatonic state in her bedroom that lasts for days, Leon tries to look after himself and baby Jake alone. De Waal touchingly describes Leon’s delight and wonder at his little brother: “the baby is like a television. Leon can’t stop watching him and all his baby movements.”
It’s hard not to feel great sympathy for Leon, a vulnerable child who bottles everything up and has so little help available to him. The brothers are fostered by Maureen, but when Jake is adopted by another family, Leon loses the little brother he loves and tried so hard to protect. He loses his precious toys when he is taken into care and they are left in the flat. He has already lost his father and mother. When she later turns up for visits, her mental decline is evident. Unsurprisingly, Leon has behavioural problems at school and turns to minor theft.
Throughout the novel there is a sense of dread that something even more terrible will happen to Leon or his brother. At the age of nine he is free to go off cycling for hours on his own and mixes with the men who tend the neighbourhood allotments. The big, brave surprise in this book is that it defies the expectation of abuse that it has cultivated – yet it also raises the question of whether the novel needs a bigger drama as it progresses to ramp up the tension.
The men prove to be harmless and take him under their wing; through them he learns about Irish republican hunger strikes and the police brutality against black people that spark the riots of 1981. Tufty, one of the allotment men, introduces Leon to his own brand of race politics, although Leon is too young to fully understand it.
De Waal skilfully brings her adult characters to life through the perspective of her child protagonist and she bestows great compassion on all her protagonists. Carol is unable to help herself, let alone the two sons she clearly loves. The women who foster Leon are flawed but well-intentioned. The men in the allotment might be a bunch of oddballs, but they become father figures for the little boy who goes to visit them. Ultimately, the novel is uplifting because we see in it a fundamental goodness in the human spirit – And with people other than his blood parents guiding him, we trust that Leon will survive the odds stacked against him.
Bernardine Evaristo’s latest novel is Mr Loverman (Penguin). To order My Name Is Leon for £10.39 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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