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Jaap Robben

It happened by the rock that his mother had often warned him about. The rock I must ‘never-never-never, look at me, never jump off.’ By keeping quiet about what happened, Mikael – who at the time of the fatal event is nine – hopes to change reality. It is some time before the reader learns the truth about what happened. In a penetrating way Robben gets under the skin of a boy who is consumed by guilt, uncertainty about the future and confu­sion about how to deal with his grieving mother.The book sparkles with short sections of dialogue. The conversations are marked by periods of silence, and it is precisely this silence – which can descend at any moment — that is very telling. The conver­sations between mother and son in particular reveal the gradual souring of their relationship. ‘We came no closer than opposite sides of the table.’ Such gems – sentences, similes or images – can be found on almost every page.Mother and son drink ‘awkward coffee’, a ball smells of ‘new raincoats’. Or take a sentence like this: ‘With the naked eye, the sail was as small as a folded piece of paper, but with my binoculars I could see that there was someone standing under the boom with a red coat on. There was someone else in a blue coat fore. I focused and saw that it was the plastic case for the jib.’The reader can’t help but feel stifled by the mother’s psychological warfare, the way she boxes her son in with passive aggression, but elsewhere seems to be trying to seduce him – Mikael reaches puberty in the course of the story – by walking about the house naked and creeping into his bed. Is she looking for a new husband in her son, or does she want to punish him for the loss of her husband? That is the key question, which eventually leads to a dramatic finale.

Robben’s description of the inner world of a child is faultless. As an oppressive story of the premature loss of innocence, Birk is on a par with Niccolo Ammaniti’s I’m Not Scared and Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden.

At first sight there’s nothing spectacular about the plot and the narrative is traditionally structured. Yet with this basis, Robben has written a novel that slowly grabs you by the throat.

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Birk

Jaap Robben is well-known as a poet, children’s author and theatre director. This, his first novel, is set on a remote island between Norway and Scotland. Only one family lives there – the nine-year-old Mikael and his father and mother, plus a solitary neighbour. The mail arrives every week by boat. One day fate strikes: Mikael’s father drowns after saving his son from the sea.

Brian lives on a forgotten patch of no man’s land with his divorced father Maurice and two dogs, in a caravan they rent from a couple of shady characters. Brother Lucien, now 16, has been institutionalised for years but his care home is in dire need of renovation. The boys’ mother has recently remarried and is on honeymoon, so the home asks Lucien’s father to take him for the summer while the work is carried out. Maurice agrees when he finds out there’s a generous weekly allowance to be had, but soon leaves Lucien to the tender mercies of his little brother.To begin with Brian neglects his task. Leaving one of the dogs to look after Lucien, he tears off on his souped-up moped to impress Selma, an older girl who is also a patient at the care home. As a result Lucien spends hours lying in soiled nappies and ends up with severe sunburn. One of the dogs gobbles down Lucien’s pills and dies the same night. Maurice, who always has a deal on the go, is hardly ever around. Brian’s only real support comes in the shape of Emile, a mysterious figure who has moved into one of the caravans on the site.Flashbacks reveal the family’s struggle to cope with Lucien: father exploits the situation for his own gain, mother abandons hope and Brian often resents the attention focused on his disabled brother. Yet as the adult world around the brothers turns grimmer, Brian moves closer to Lucien. He teaches him to walk and starts to notice what makes him smile, simple things like chucking bottles into the bottle bank. Slowly Brian discovers an urge to look out for his brother. When tensions at the caravan site come to a head, he makes a moving final pledge to Lucien: ‘When I’m old enough, you can come and live with me. Promise. And you won’t have to take those drugs anymore.’Summer Coat is an honest, tender account of brotherly love in troubled circumstances. Like its predecessor Birk, the novel is sure to find an enthusiastic young adult audience. But its subtle yet unflinching examination of how people try and sometimes fail to cope with disability make this a coming-of-age novel that will resonate deeply with every reader.

Form and content come together beautifully in a gripping tale of trust, betrayal, solidarity and adolescence.

Jaap Robben handles delicate, dangerous material with subtlety and sympathy, but also with a visionary sense of truth that is masterly and unforgettable.

Zomer vacht

In Jaap Robben’s debut novel Birk, a boy is manipulated into taking his dead father’s place. Now, in 'Summer Coat', Brian, the 13-year-old protagonist, also feels the crushing weight of an adult responsibility too much to bear as he is expected to care for his physically and mentally disabled brother Lucien for a whole summer.

Summer Coat

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