Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey

Late on a hot summer night in 1965, Charlie Bucktin, a bookish boy of 13, is startled by an urgent knock on the window of his sleep-out. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in the regional mining town of Corrigan. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant figure of danger and intrigue for Charlie. So when Jasper begs for his help, Charlie eagerly steels into the night by his side, afraid but desperate to impress.

Jasper takes him through town and to his secret glade in the bush, and it's here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper's horrible discovery. With this secret like a brick in his belly, Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion. In the simmering summer where everything changes, Charlie learns to discern truth from myth and why the truth of things is so hard to know, and even harder to hold in his heart.

More often than not, small town fiction seems to work. There is something about the dynamics of a small community that rattles our literary cage; that is certainly true with our group anyway! Jasper Jones was generally enjoyed by everyone, finding it more or less realistic and probable, particularly the relationship between Charlie and Jasper. A few of us brought up the issue of Charlie's mature views and articulation skills, but we were willing to forgive this small point for the well manufactured plot's sake.

Our discussion took a few turns, but basically centred on small town prejudice, injustices and hidden abuse; were they really so prevalent in small isolated communities and are they still? These issues do seem to come up often in fiction, which we do not find surprising nor unrealistic (I think we are all realists at heart). But we did detect a small amount of superficial Hollywoodifying in Jasper's case and some of us went so far as to say the story as a whole was a little far-fetched.

We did agree that this did not lessen the story's impact for our club's purposes though, and the well written visual descriptions, character development and conclusion made the reading journey more than satisfactory. Mockingbird it is not ... but then we don't believe the author ever intended it to be.