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Book Review: Candy, by Kevin Brooks

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Joe’s whole world changes when he meets Candy outside King’s Cross station. She’s so beautiful and charismatic, and he becomes happily obsessed straight away. Even when he meets the terrifying Iggy, who easily intimidates them both, he doesn’t want to believe that there’s something strange going on. He doesn’t care that she could be dangerous, that dangerous things could be happening to her. All he wants is to spend more time with her, but she’s already made a big commitment to something else: heroin.

I found Candy to be extremely easy to read. That’s the thing that struck me the most about it. Sometimes, when I’m reading a book, I feel the urge to take a break from it, to get my entertainment in other forms – listen to music or watch a film. Not so with Candy. The writing just flows. I don’t think the book would work if it didn’t have this quality, making it compulsively readable – Joe knows his relationship with Candy is doomed, we know it’s doomed, but we still want to know how it all comes to an end.

The characters are vivid, if not especially original – Joe lives a pretty quiet life in the suburbs with his father and older sister, Gina. He plays in a band, The Katies, although he lacks the passion of the other band members. Candy ran away from the same town, making a few naive and sad mistakes that lead to her downfall.

The story is quite simplistic, there aren’t many twists and turns, and I think it’s Joe’s style of thinking that drives the story. He acts impulsively, going against good judgement, but we can understand why he does it, although I don’t think Joe loves Candy as much as he loves the idea of her – they barely get to know each other.

I enjoyed reading Candy, though I don’t think I’ll read it again. I would recommend it, and I would like to read more books by Kevin Brooks in the future, but the world of Candy isn’t a place I can see myself wanting to return to.

Book Review: The Butterfly Tattoo, by Philip Pullman

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Trailer for the 2008 feature film adaptation of the book, The Butterfly Tattoo.

I can’t think of a better way to summarise this short thriller than its opening line: ‘Chris Marshall met the girl he was going to kill on a warm night in early June, when one of the colleges in Oxford was holding its summer ball.’ Chris is a seventeen-year old boy, working for Barry Miller and his company, Oxford Entertainment Systems. He is between childhood and adulthood, planning on going to university, and still dealing with the break up of his parents’ marriage. The girl who becomes the catalyst that changes everything is Jenny, a few years older, more mature, but with a much more unstable life, living in a squat and taking odd jobs. When they find each other, everything becomes sweeter for both of them, but only for a little while, before Barry Miller confides in Chris that there is a man called Carson after him, and asks him to help him build a hideout near the canal.

Chris is a character who rushes into everything. From his romance with Jenny, to the conclusions he jumps to about Barry, he barely takes a moment to question what he is doing, to question himself. He decides to see the world as black and white, even when it makes no sense, even when everything in his own life is about shades of grey. He is the sort of person that I find very frustrating, but that makes a good character. Jenny is more sympathetic, wiser, but more tragic, especially as Chris gives her hope that her life can get better. The reader knows how the story will end at the start and I think this gives the book a strange kind of energy. I knew the two young protagonists were hurtling towards certain doom, even during the happy times, and that made me want to jump into the book and change things (a bit like a Brecht play).

I enjoyed reading The Butterfly Tattoo, but I was glad that it was such a short book. There was far too much telling, and not enough showing, and it was based around the dreaded insta-love, at least on Chris’ part. I thought it was pretty clear that Chris was in lust rather than in love because he was infatuated with Jenny from the start, without knowing anything about her. Jenny doesn’t get as obsessed as quickly so there is a good contrast there, but I would have liked to have seen him realise that he wasn’t really in love with her, or to at least have the author acknowledge it. As for the ending, I predicted what would happen a few pages before it did, but it was still quite creepy and poignant. 

The Butterfly Tattoo is the only book I have read by Philip Pullman that isn’t part of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and I was a bit disappointed by it. I think that as it is far shorter than any of those books, it’s intended for a much more reluctant reader than I have ever been. I can see it appealing to teenagers who don’t read a lot, with its dark subject matter and tight plot. However, The Butterfly Tattoo was originally published in 1992 (as The White Mercedes), reissued in 2005. Nobody in the story has a mobile phone, and if there had been mobile phones, all the disasters in the plot could have been easily averted. I found this distracting enough! The film adaptation was produced in 2008, and I haven’t seen it, but I would like to find out how they dealt with this issue.