Hangman

In a note appended to her novel Jarman comments that she has ‘used a mixture of real life and imagination to create a fiction which tells a truth.’ While the real and the imaginative dimensions to her engrossing and frightening story are not always rigidly separated, the former has more to do with its tellingly observed contemporary school setting, the latter with a trip which the pupils make to the Normandy beaches of the second World War;: the truth which binds both of these is concerned with the nature of fascism and its numerous manifestations.

Focusing on Danny Lamb, a boy whose only crime is to be different, Jarman provides a searing insight into the mindlessness of bullying and the fickleness of so-called friendship. There are a few moments of awkward symbolism but, in general terms, the narrative successfully and convincingly maintains the reader’s involvement.