Stone Cold by Robert Swindells – review
Kids are disappearing, but no one cares…
Saturday 26 March, 2011
Robert Swindells is known for writing thought-provoking novels about contemporary society and Stone Cold, published in 1993, is certainly one of them. It was awarded the Carnegie Medal and Sheffield Children’s Book Award in 1994 and it was adapted for the screen by the BBC in 1997.
One of the main characters in the novel is Link. When he was fourteen years old his father ran off with a receptionist. Link’s life became a mess but he stuck it out in school and managed to finish with five GCSEs. His mother has by then met Vince whom accuses Link of living on his money since Link is unable to find work. Finally, Link cannot stand anymore of Vince’s verbal abuse and therefore decides to try his luck in London instead. However, he runs out of money and ends up on the streets where he befriends Ginger, who teaches him about the life of a homeless person. What the two of them are not aware of though, is that there is serial killer on the loose in London and his target is homeless people, Link and Ginger included. Unfortunately, no one seems to care when homeless teenagers start disappearing and one day Ginger does not turn up at their agreed meeting point.
The story of this novel is also written from the viewpoint of another character who calls himself Shelter. He has been discharged from the army where he used to turn young men into proper soldiers and his belief is that there is a plot of undermining the country by filling it with homeless people, alcoholics and drug addicts and that it is his duty to clean up the streets.
Throughout the novel we follow Link and Shelter in alternating chapters and both stories are told in first person. In the chapters about Link we follow his struggle to survive and he is made likeable by being a victim and by the way his story is told with a colloquial language and he often turns to the reader, for example when describing in detail how it feels trying to go to sleep on a hard concrete floor when your feet are as cold as ice. The language in the chapters where we follow Shelter is different and you get a military feeling with short sentences and harsh words and these chapters are also a lot shorter. We follow Shelter from where he meticulously plans how to lure the homeless youngsters to his home until he is a full-fledged serial killer. Shelter also turns to the reader, but this does not have the same effect as with Link’s story since the reader quite early understands that his plans are to murder young people. Shelter himself does not quite seem to understand why he was discharged from the army but to the reader this soon becomes quite clear.
This novel is a very realistic novel about teenage problems, but as many other novels it has a touch of adventure in that Link tries to find out what has happened to Ginger and for a moment he goes from being a nobody to being a hero even though it is just for a short while. There is also a touch of family story in the beginning when the reader is told about the abusive situation in Link’s family and the fact that his own mother does not stand up for him. But most of all it is a teenage problem novel with a tale of what could happen to you if leave your home without having anywhere to live and no money and that running away does not solve the problem. But it is also a story of what can happen if parents choose to ignore the way their children are treated. Furthermore, my opinion is that Swindells’ main reason for writing this novel is to give a very realistic picture of the lives of the homeless people. The people that most of us tend to choose not to see when we pass them in the streets, believing that it is probably their own fault that they are living like that.
The topic of teenagers living in an abusive home is not a new one. Neither is teenagers on the run and living on the streets. Teenage problem novels have been written in thousands and it is a sub-genre of young adult literature. They can also be said to belong to the genre of moral and instructive tales. The early novels in this genre were written mostly to teach children how to behave in a mature way, whereas during the late twentieth century they came to have a much more social and political point of view and Stone Cold is certainly a part of this tradition. Examples of earlier texts in this sub-genre are The Catcher in the Rye (1951), The Outsiders (1967), Go Ask Alice (1971), Forever (1975) and Dear Nobody (1991) who all deal with problems faced by teenagers such as drugs, confusion, rebellion, sex, pregnancy and friendships.
Swindells’ describes very well how easily a young person can end up being an outcast in society without actually having done anything wrong, which I also think is the message of this book. It gives you another view of homeless people and you understand that there might be other reasons than alcoholism and drug addiction that causes young people to end up in the streets, that there are children who would rather live like that than go back to the abusive homes they came from and this causes me as a reader to view upon homelessness with different eyes.
The ending of this novel is very open and free to interpret the way the reader wishes and this is perhaps a negative point since I would have wished for a happier ending. Furthermore, it does not quite match the excitement that has been built up in the rest of novel, but feels rather flat in comparison, almost like Swindells got bored with the story. Nonetheless, I think this is a thought-provoking novel with an enthralling plot which is well worth reading.
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