Weirdo by Cathi Unsworth

Normally, I’m not a fan of invented places in fiction. I much prefer the Stuart MacBride approach of setting novels in recognisable locations, rather than making them up (in MacBride’s case it helps that I lived in Aberdeen for three years so am very familiar with his locations. Cathi Unsworth’s Weirdo, however, has such an extraordinary sense of place it doesn’t matter that her Norfolk seaside town of Ernemouth is not a real place because Cathi describes it so vividly it comes to life.

What she also does in this novel is get inside the heads of troubled teenagers and see the world – big, unfriendly, aggressive – from their solipsistic point of view. It’s quite a feat, describing the fractured views of genuinely confused young people with such acuity that you believe, entirely, in them and their several crises. Make no mistake, Weirdo is an excellent book.

The drama alternates betwen 1984, when a young boy was horrifically – possibly satanically – murdered in an old pillbox on the Norfolk coastline, and 2003, when Sean Ward, a private detective is reinvestigating the case after new DNA evidence comes to light casting doubt on the verdict in the original court case. In that, Corinne Woodrow, a damaged 15-year-old girl, was alone convicted of the murder but this new evidence suggests there may have been someone else present when the crime was committed. We see the gradual unfurling of the original crime, the coming together of a group of disconnected and disaffected young people, their orbits colliding catastrophically until disaster becomes inevitable; and, simultaneously, we follow Sean as he and a friendly local journalist try to unpick those same events from across the divide of two decades of silence and cover-up. As with most of Cathi Unsworth’s novels, there is a large and rich cast of characters, and each possesses their own foibles and concerns. It quickly becomes apparent that all is not as it seems and that Corinne Woodrow may be an innocent wronged.

There is a crime here, and a mystery to be resolved (and very effectively it is, too), but in some regards Weirdo isn’t a crime novel. I’m not sure any of Cathi’s books are. She’s on record as saying: “It is not the investigators, but the victims of crime to whom I want to give the main voices in my novels.” And that is the key to her writing. This is not a solve-it-by-numbers kind of novel, where things happen because they have to in order to develop the plot. Cathi Unsworth creates believable characters and you can tell she cares about them and, in so doing, she makes us care about them. Corinne is a fragile soul, and there is an inevitability about the way she is damaged, over and again, by a cold and calculating universe.

Thus, we are taken deep into the world of these teenage misfits, much more densely than we would had the novel been written by someone else, because for Cathi it’s character that matters, not plot. Sure, the central action is shocking and you want to have the solution revealed, but the novel explores the danse macabre of these various young participants, seeing in each of them the failures and triumphs, fears, humiliations, anger and love, hope and despair that helped shape them as human beings, helped each one to play their part in the tragedy that unfolded. It’s beautifully done.