The Liberators

‘He felt in a choking way that a net was being drawn around him, that the dim, vague future was forming into a clearly defined and dangerous path.’ This is the realisation that strikes 13-year-old Ivo Moncrieff soon after he has experienced something very unexpected and sinister on his way to stay with his London aunt and uncle. It is the London of our own time and by no means the least of Womack’s achievements in this ambitious and intelligent novel is to sketch in, as background, the political and economic ethos of contemporary Britain. The foreground, however, will probably be of more immediate interest to young readers, many of whom should be kept on the edge of their seats by a narrative which, early on, is dominated by a dismembered corpse and soon develops into a fascinating exploration of the type of society endorsed by the ‘liberators’ of the title, ‘untrammelled by restraints’ where we could ‘act on every impulse, every desire, without fear, without consequence’. The characterisation is rich and entertainingly varied, with some individuals who would not be out of place in an Iris Murdoch novel: the arty pretensions of Ivo’s aunt and uncle are tellingly skewered. This, in spite of a few patches of over-writing, is the sort of young adult novel that gives the genre a good name.