Susan Hill

Esther Freud

I'm the King of the Castle

Emmett

Tussles and torment are enacted away from benevolent but blind adult eyes, in the hard, wet dark undergrowth of the childhood world. Here childhood is not a (prelapsarian) garden of promise, but a forest with deep pools and sharp stones, in which is possible to get lost. But fear comes not from things or places, as the unwelcome young visitor Kingshaw realises, but people. Here children are cunning, cruel, perceptive, fully capable of violence, locked in relationships of predator and prey - as sensitive to the balances of power as fully-fledged kings, with castles/hearts to rule and own. There's only so much this reader can take, rooting for poor misjudged Kingshaw struggling to survive, whose soft heart earns him nary a good end. What is most pertinent and disquieting is the not-newness of it all, that here is not some thing Hill has dreamed of or found, but something present but hiding. The insecurites and hostilities of our childhood, long buried in the depths of one's mind, are now dragged out snarling in the light of her pen. The readerly effect isn't solely sympathy for poor terrorised Kingshaw, but fleeting pricks of identification. What is here is not a discovery of something unfamiliar, but an awakening - of the dormant enmity and terror previously unrepresented by the adult-cherished image of childhood idyll.

I'm the King of the Castle

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