Book review: The Uninvited – suffer the children

Violent children are always disturbing. Perhaps it’s the idea of innocence lost so early that is frightening; perhaps because it is so unexpected to find very young children as perpetrators of vicious, bloody murders. Either way, extreme violence from a child as the premise for a book is enough to either entirely repulse or entirely put a reader in a trance, depending on how well it’s written.

Liz Jensen, however, writes her latest book The Uninvited with precision fluidity, beginning with the protagonist’s recollection of “when a young child in butterfly pajamas slaughtered her grandmother with a nail-gun to the neck...No reason, no warning.”

Narrated by Hesketh Lock, a consultant for a global troubleshooting company, the story follows a series of violent spates by children, and corporate sabotage by adults claiming they didn’t act of their own volition. Lock suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, which makes him incapable of lying or even imagining anything beyond the absolute empirical reality, and thus we are led to trust his account of the events. He explains, “My contract with the world holds that there are no secrets we can’t unlock, with persistence and time, because everything has a precedent.”

Yet when his adorable stepson is shockingly found to be involved in a murder, forcing a sudden but clear shift in the paradigm he recognises, Lock is unable to remain a purely disengaged observer. It’s an odd book that relies on an unemotional “robot made of meat” narrator to tell its story, and it should be hard to relate to Lock, who tries to navigate society without understanding many of the social cues that people around him immediately pick up on. But it’s not, and this is a testament to Jensen’s simple and effective prose. It is a book with many frightening aspects — one being how easy it is to read and accept what is being suggested, because “whatever is shaking the foundations of the reality we know, it is something we have summoned.”

All over the world these changeling children force global society and economy into ruin. Lock attempts to understand why children, after murdering their family members, appear to be retreating into a world of their own, a “world with no adults, no toilets, no fresh food, a world with its own landscape, and props, its minerals, its food sources, its rites and rituals, its gestural password, its hierarchies, its own unassailable imperatives.” The Uninvited is perfect cerebral horror — while there may be blood and violence, what is ultimately frightening is what the future holds for a “species in crisis: a species on the brink of collapse.”

As with some of Jensen’s previous books, The Uninvited too has elements of an eco-thriller, and of a prelude to dystopia, built from many different mythological cultures. There is the suggestion of the Gaia hypothesis — that everything in the world co-evolves with its environment — which leads to a frightening but highly probable future, because “human history is a juggernaut. If it’s to change direction, it must first come to a stop.” It makes this film a quiet, compact and a creepy little cautionary tale that is completely relevant to modern society.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, December 23^rd, 2012.

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