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There’s a particular energy to novels written from the point of view of small children. Humour, of course, in the things the child misinterprets; pathos in the things they feel they must keep hidden; jeopardy in the dangers we can see, and they cannot. As any relative or babysitter can attest, even the sweetest child can become mind-numbingly dull when they’re all the company one has, so there’s a skill to charm without boring. The other skill is to find ways of enabling the reader to read over the child’s shoulder, as it were, to piece together for themselves the adult dramas to which a child’s natural egotism, or simple innocence, blinds them.
In 1988, the longsuffering mother in Seán Farrell’s first novel, Frogs for Watchdogs, is stranded. This Englishwoman has had a boy and a girl with a handsome rogue of an Irish actor, but he has walked out on them. Asked to leave a commune unsuited to children, skint, too proud, perhaps, to return to the protection of well-heeled parents in England, she rents a farmhouse on the cheap in the deep countryside of County Meath, where she can grow vegetables, raise hens and a few sheep, and attempt to scrabble a living as a healer. (From the multiple dilutions her boy witnesses her perform, her fairly batty practice would seem to be some form of homeopathy with new age elements thrown in.) While her doubtless appalled parents insist on sending the oldest child, a forthright girl called B, to an English boarding school, B’s younger brother spends months running happily feral. Once he is eight, he will be old enough to follow her and be tamed and anglicised.
Unnamed, so that he becomes a sort of Everyboy, he is a vividly unwashed, scabby-kneed creation, consumed by a little-man protective love for his mother and sister, ruled by devoutly held private rituals that are bound up in the passionate interest he takes in the landscape, birds and animals around him, from the screeching crows to the easily spooked Jacob’s sheep. He is drawn to a no less eccentric and evidently lonely old woman in the village, to whom he delivers his mother’s cures and who repays him with biscuits, barely comprehended scandal and snatches of doomy superstition to match his own.
So far, so muddily idyllic, but then a farm worker from Inishmaan, Gearóid Ó Direáin, who lives in a caravan up the road, starts to take an interest, helping the boy’s mother build a drystone wall and taking cures from her in turn. The boy follows the anglophone locals and wilfully mispronounces his Irish name, dubbing him Jerry Drain. Deeply mistrustful, fighting the instincts of a fatherless boy to be drawn to a father figure, he meets his low-key charm offensive with a campaign of unsmiling wordlessness. When that fails, and as even his sternly bookish sister seems to be succumbing, he mixes rat poison into the latest cure his mother has him deliver to Gearóid, recovering his tongue sufficiently to deliver the instruction to swallow multiple doses.
Frogs for Watchdogs was garlanded with praise on its Irish publication last spring, and it’s easy to see why. It is funny, evokes a child’s vivid sense of place and ultimately is deeply touching as Gearóid trains up the boy to help him in a chip van venture, gives him discreet lessons in how to be a decent man and, as the time approaches when the regular bathing and school uniform of England can no longer be avoided, wins him over by minute degrees, as one might coax trust from a stray dog.
The pity is that Farrell doesn’t entirely trust his ability to convey all the reader needs to understand through the boy’s own voice. On several occasions he slips into Gearóid’s head, to give us his perspective on the boy. Because this tells us nothing we haven’t already guessed, apart from the fact that Gearóid lost his own father to a drowning when he was the boy’s age, it serves merely to disrupt the child-centred narrative and to make the man seem less intriguing, even a sentimental figure. This is a minor criticism, however, of a novel whose crinkle-eyed charm is so hard to resist.
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Frogs for Watchdogs by Seán Farrell is published by John Murray (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
