Jonathan Trigell

Genus is gritty. It happens 1-2 hundred or so years in our future. Things have changed, and yet, it’s amazing how much they’ve stayed the same. Still the have’s and have not’s, still ‘us’ vs. ‘them’. But we now have a new line in the sand to use for discrimination. It’s not our race any more or the color of our skin, not even our religion (because that has mostly been wiped out) but our genes. A scientist discovered a way to manipulate human DNA reliably and those who can show more afford it (and those who can’t afford not to) pay for designer babies, no longer are our children’s future left up to chance.

We come upon the scene when Improved vs. Unimproved is reaching its pinnacle. Those whose parents didn’t pay for improvements to their genes are fast becoming 2nd class citizens. They are unwanted and underfoot. Most came from the poor who couldn’t afford gene manipulations and the remnants of the religious who believed it to be an act against God to play god with their offspring. Now these poor are slowly herded into places like the Kross. They are poor because they are unimproved and can’t find gainful employment and they are unimproved because they are poor. Healthy women have a commodity as a ‘broodmare’ they can sell; carrying other women's improved children to term. Everyone else tries to make do how they can.

I found this book to be thought provoking and very well written. It had a mystery that was very well done and turned out to be a great conspiracy. The underlying story is taking a look at hate of others for being different, in the end it was very similar to the Nazi’s and the Jews, the US and the Native Americans, the Muslims in Bosnia. Anywhere hate of the other is allowed to fester or worse encouraged to the point of genocide. While the story is told from the point of view of several different people, the primary one is a cripple, born from hubris. A man trying to make his way in the world the best he can, with what talent he has. It really makes you think. show less

Boy A is a very challenging book, dealing with one hell of a delicate subject. Boy A is a child murderer just released from institutional care and prison where he has been since his involvement (with another boy) in the murder of a beautiful young girl when he was 10 years old. The second boy hanged himself or was lynched whilst in prison. The book constantly reminded me of the Bulger murder as the story is so similar,except in this case the victim was a young female. The book is splendidly show more written with a bleak,dark atmosphere of forboding from start to finish. The author captures the hopelessness not only of Jack's (Boy A) situation as he tries to settle into a new life and reinvent himself, but also paints a dreary picture of the society and circumstances in which he was brought up, giving the impression that these senseless murders are just waiting to happen,and that the boy is almost as much a victim as the girl he helped to murder. The author is also scathing in his attitude to the gutter press,and their campaigns for mob revenge on the two boys, for example the hanging of boy B in prison was greeted in The Sun with the headline "Good Riddance". I think the author does a magnificent job of getting across the point that when something as horrific as the murder of a child occurs,society needs to see an angel in the victim and a monster in the perpetrator,there can be no room for a grey area,because that would mean that we would all have to look closely at our own shortcomings and ask ourselves how these situations can be allowed to develop in the first place.The author captures this mood nicely by reversing the adage "Only the good die young" to "Only the young die good".
Trigell's fine first novel challenges the black and white thinking which most of us adopt to help us cope with such unpleasent situations, and poses challenges for parents, health care systems, education systems;specifically bullying in schools, and policing systems.
Boy A is a harrowing book and will not be to everyone's taste. I thought it was an excellent read, dealing with a very difficult subject,and the writing is superb show less

Boy A is a haunting read, provoking the reader to engage with ambiguous issues and to examine their own reactions to the shades of grey of our society that are often rendered in the media in black and white.
The narrative focuses on the release of a man who may, or may not, have been guilty of a child abduction and murder when himself a child. In interleaving flashbacks the tangled threads of the histories of various of the characters are traced through to their consequences for the present. show more As is to be expected of a book dealing with this subject matter, the book does contain some graphic violence and sexual language

Trigell obviously loves language and uses it richly and imaginatively, even poetically. At times the fascination with tricks of language does get in the way, being a bit too clever, intruding into the narrative. This is especially incongruous when they occur in dialogue. This is an engaging, thought provoking read. However, ultimately I found it to be just a little too predictable and not substantial enough to be completely satisfying. show less

This book was something else.. dystopian vignettes of human, and Improved human life, dozens of characters, and the book subtly teased out the connections between them. The themes of beauty, art and illusion, are twined in with brutish human life and sterile generich life (and I loved that generich was one letter from generic!)
It has subtle flowing language throughout - I learned the words inutile and fubsy in a couple of paragraphs. And then there's this...

"Whole nations can be wrong and so show more often have been. Quantity does not create sense, but only a sense of sense. if something is not real then it must be imagined. The fact that the same delusion is shared by two people or ten or ten million doesn't make it more real, only more dangerous." show less