Smack (1996)

I was up a goodly portion of the night reading this book. I didn't mean to be. It's that kind of book, though.

Stark, brilliant and uncompromising, this is the story of a couple of kids who find a life less ordinary in the squats of early 1980s England. They also find heroin and love, though they have a hard time telling the two apart.

The way Burgess moves his reader from the head of one kid into the head of the next is a perfect vehicle to show how their interdependent rationalizations function. The slippery slope from self-serving narcissistic adolescence to self-serving narcissistic drug addiction is delineated in letters of fire here. The adults on the fringes are nicely drawn as well. The way people wander in and out of the circle is so well done as to be almost invisible.

This is a searing portrait of addiction and ruin that rings so true it's painful to read. The characters are not particularly sympathetic, but that also seems right.

Extremely minor quibble: there's a perfectly unnecessary glossary in the back- all the British slang is completely obvious in context.
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This was okay. I read it in one sitting and it certainly didn't bore me but it wasn't anything spectacular. I couldn't really warm to Gemma- I just found her rather annoying. Tar was all right and Lily was definitely my favourite of the bunch. The story was all right though rather predictable...nothing happened that I didn't expect. It was an interesting enough read though not extremely memorable. ( )

A cheerful tale of underage runaway teenagers in 1980's Bristol in a downward spiral of drug abuse, crime, prostitution and drug dealing. Sorry - I'm being sarcastic - not very cheerful at all really. I wasn't really expecting to enjoy this book as much as I did - I don't usually go for gritty realism - but I actually stayed up late to finish it.

Tar runs away from an abusive father and alcoholic mother and his girlfriend Gemma follows some weeks later when her parents overreact about their relationship. Initially befriended by Richard, an anarchist (whose main act of anarchy seems to consist of putting super-glue in the locks of banks to stop them opening), Gemma feels patronised by the slighly older people in their squat who she accuses of acting like her parents and both her and Tar move out into another squat with the younger Rob and Lily, both heroin users. And everything goes downhill from there. Gemma and Tar both become locked into a cycle of self-deception that they are not really junkies and could stop any time they want to, and Gemma ends up working as a prostitute to pay for her habit while Tar steals from everyone he knows. The cycle is only broken when Gemma becomes pregnant and wants to keep the baby.

I found this a very well written book. Both Gemma and Tar were believable fairly normal teenagers who had got themselves into circumstances they could not cope with because of their family circumstances. Each chapter is narrated by a different character including the parents of Gemma and Tar and it is clear that everyone is deceiving themselves to a certain degree. The book raises some interesting issues about the destructive nature of illegal versus legal drugs. Tar's mother is an alcoholic and we learn at the end that Tar's father is an alcoholic as well. Alcohol has been equally destructive in the father's life as heroin has been in his son's and both seem equally unable to face the consequences of their actions. Very thought provoking.
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Often felt more like a citizenship class than a novel. The target audience is a little old for shallow cautionary tales like this one. ( )

The subject of drug addiction, pregnancy, homelessness and abuse is never an easy subject to deal with, especially when it comes to Young Adult novels, but Melving Burgess has managed to do it from the point of view of his two characters. While this is not a very cheerful book, it doesn't dwell on sordid details; rather, it shows the point of views of everyone involved in the lives of the two main protagonists and the reader is compelled to follow their descent into addiction. I do not perceive the ending as a 'happy ending', but there is hope, which is important if YA readers are to understand the result of such life-changing subjects as anything but completely negative and inevitable in the outcome. There can be ways out of homelessness, there are ways out of drugs and pregnancy doesn't mean the end of the world - in this, the book is completely different in its overall impressions from, say, the world of such books like 'Trainspotting' (Irvine Welsh). ( )