Blueeyedboy

Blueeyedboy, by Joanne Harris, Doubleday £18.99, 416 pages, FT Bookshop price: £15.19

In a house full of ugly china dogs and secrets, a boy taps at a keyboard, communicating with his online friends via the avatar blueeyedboy. He’s a rather large boy – one of the few straightforward facts about him is his age, which is 42. But since he lives with his controlling mother and writes continually about his past, his adult status is at least as dubious as anything else about him.

Blueeyedboy writes stories on a website called badguysrock, which is the first of Joanne Harris’s many natty wordplays – is the site an island to isolate bad guys, or a slangy celebration of them? Blueeyedboy himself is apparently a very naughty boy, who may be responsible for a string of murders or may, like so many other miscreant children, be making it all up. Either way, he’s certainly adding spice to a few dull lives. His online followers include Claire, a sappy, celebrity-obsessed therapist; a fat chick called Cherissy, who likes emoticons even more than ice-cream; a couple of long-distance perverts turned on by all the hatred he spills on to his web journal; and Albertine, the girlfriend of blueeyedboy’s thuggish (and, by chapter two, dead) brother Nigel.

Harris made her name with the Whitbread Award-nominated (and subsequently Oscar-nominated) Chocolat in 1999, and her prose has a gooey richness rather reminiscent of the confectionery at the heart of that novel. Sometimes this works; sometimes, to use one of her least felicitous examples, it becomes a ball of yarn that winds round and round until you drop your guard and it blows up in your face. Her Francophilia (the majority of her previous adult novels have been set in France) has been useful on this front, because overwrought prose jars a little less in exotic locations, especially if there’s a dash of magic (as there was in Chocolat and its follow-up The Lollipop Shoes) to balance the sugar.

In Blueeyedboy, however, she returns to the Midlands setting of 2005’s Gentlemen and Players. In a village riven by class difference, ghastly Gloria cleans rich women’s houses and brings up her three boys each dressed in a different colour. All, in their different ways, writhe beneath her stiletto heel; two escape via violent death, leaving only blueeyedboy, a stunted, vengeful, terminally dishonest geek, who suffers from delusions (or are they?), the commingling of different senses known as synaesthesia (or does he?) and an unhealthy obsession with a long-dead local prodigy, the blind child painter Emily White.

The skittering between time frame and point of view – between Emily’s life and blueeyedboy’s fiction, or Albertine’s journal and the miserable existence of Gloria’s surviving son – is confusing. But the snarled plot is poor compensation for characters so simply drawn that, like Gloria’s sons, they need colours to distinguish them. Emily White, Gloria Green and Dr Peacock, in a murder mystery, are a little too reminiscent of Cluedo.

This is certainly a dangerous corner of the world. Was ever a private school more beset with homicidal oiks than St Oswald’s? In Gentlemen and Players, it was the caretaker’s son; here, it’s the cleaner’s. Whether blueeyedboy is a murderer or not, the village is certainly losing inhabitants to unnatural causes at a remarkable rate. Yet nobody is alarmed by blueeyedboy’s online rants – his therapist even congratulates him for expressing himself, which seems exceptionally dim.

Harris is brave to take on the internet, but she should make up her mind whether she wants to write literature or schlock. If the latter, the online meta-musings on the nature of fiction are probably out of place; for the former, meanwhile, she needs to ratchet up her opinion of her readers’ intelligence, and cut down on the number of fools she kills. There is even a character assassination: a moth-eaten Guardian journalist named Jeffrey Stuarts who piggybacks on little Emily’s success. Would this have anything to do with an excoriating review of Harris’s 2002 novel Coastliners in that paper by one Stuart Jeffries? Blueeyedboy may not be the only one obsessed by revenge.