The God Boy by Ian Cross
New Zealand setting and New Zealand author, this was first published in 1957 and reissued as a Penguin Classics in the early 2000s. It has been deservedly held in high regard, though on occasion set as a school text for teenagers and therefore hated by some of them.
It is certainly a novel for older children, and adults too. Written from the viewpoint of thirteen year old Jimmy Sullivan looking back a couple of years to a massive trauma in his family, Ian Cross manages brilliantly to convey emotional truth and insight and at the same time, with the same words, so much that Jimmy misunderstands and that he reaches out to understand. We understand more than he does, for though he is smart and perceptive he also has to hide his own pain from himself. We feel it for him and that can make it a tough read: feeling the pain of someone who’s not yet able to feel his own pain.
He shares himself generously: his strategies for managing, the rituals to keep himself safe, the lies to bolster himself, the outbursts when it all gets too much. Cross writes with a great deal of compassion and insight.
And that title? God is here all right, but as an uncertain quantity with whom Jimmy has an ongoing beef which provides another way of making space for himself. That it is not resolved within the book is part of its integrity. Uncertainty and ambivalence are given room.
The church is here too, in the form of a Catholic school with nuns as teachers and a weekly confessional. It is in keeping with the author’s own generosity of spirit that these figures are not mocked, for all that they are sometimes out of their depth, but seen as a precious leaven in a community still inventing itself.
