The Outcast

It’s 1957. Lewis Aldridge is nineteen and just out of prison. Even though ‘his father had sent him enough money not to come home… he hadn’t asked him not to.’ So Lewis takes the train back to his stiflingly well-to-do village with its silences, secrets and small talk, where his bed has been made, ready for his return and Alice, his step-mother, opens the door to him ‘smiling very brightly.’ Perhaps too brightly. Then we begin to piece together the events that led him here.

Fans of Atonement will love this absorbing story, told in breathless, desperate prose. Lewis is a persuasive hero. Set apart from the community by the mysterious drowning of his vivacious, loving mother and shunned by his emotionally paralysed father, Lewis retreats further and further inside himself, but the world just won’t leave him alone.

Pushed to the brink, Lewis starts losing his grip on reality and starts to self-destruct, hating himself almost as much as everyone else. Everyone, that is, but Kit Carmichael, the ingénue-next-door whose rich father not only runs their particular hamlet but also his household: the former with his influence, the latter with his fists. With her own fair share of unspeakable secrets to keep, Kit thinks she’s the only person in the world who understands Lewis. She longs to reach him but everything’s against her – her family, her age, even Lewis himself. She takes refuge in her books and records but they can’t protect her from her father and his increasingly zealous violence. Will Lewis notice her in time?

Sadie Jones gracefully skips from one perspective to the next: Gilbert – Lewis’s hopeless father – reacts with increasing muteness as his family falls apart. He remarries but it’s clear from the off that the needy and immature Alice isn’t going to get what she craves from the union. Unable to have a baby of her own, shell-shocked Lewis is hardly the child she pictured and although she tries to be a mother to him, her efforts are both paltry and wasted. Meanwhile in the Carmichael household, Kit’s brittle, picture-perfect mother and her sister Tamsin are chillingly drawn. Pitiless in their pearls they won’t lift a finger to help Kit, much less break a manicured nail.

Compellingly claustrophobic and delicately tragic, Sadie Jones delivers not only an enthralling narrative but conveys the enormous sense of vacuum in post-war Britain. Gaps in the London skyline parallel the oppressive absence of Lewis’s mother. Elvis has yet to reach the cosseted commuter belt where the local round of posh luncheons, tennis on the lawn and Sunday best mark time more effectively than any clock. It’s a business-as-usual surface which belies brutality, lust and horror. But will Lewis and Kit be the victims or perpetrators?