Mal Peet (with Meg Rosoff), Beck, Walker Books Australia, 1 Oct 2016, 267pp., $24.99 (hbk), ISBN 9781406331127
Beck is an English orphan born of an English mother and an African soldier, who is shipped across to Canada as cheap labour. Worse than the emotionless nuns back in Liverpool are the cunning Christian Brothers who groom their charges for their own pleasures, beating them if they don’t comply. When Beck refuses to submit to the perverse demands of Brother Robert, he is thrashed and sexually assaulted. The Brothers send him away to be a slave-like farm hand to a family whose hardship would be lamentable if they weren’t crueller to Beck than they are to their own struggling livestock. Beck makes his escape and spends time on the road until he is kindly taken in by bootleggers carrying whiskey over the border. When the smugglers are attacked by a rival gang, Beck is forced back onto the road for his own safety. More tortuous months go by until Beck is discovered warming his half-starved body by a burning tree lit by a lightning strike. His saviour is Grace, a powerful Blackfoot woman, who is engrossed by the boy-man and invites him to work for her. Although they initially deny their attraction for each other, it is inevitably sanctioned by the tribe and Beck finds a true home.
There are moments of great writing in this book. Peet’s description of a storm building up behind Beck as he walks through wheat fields (‘Black waves, immense, capped with grey spume, collapsed and folded into each other with implacable slowness’) is something that continues to haunt me. But there are descriptions of terrible brutality as well, passages that show the extremes of human cruelty that need a sophisticated reader. After Beck’s early tragedies, I kept expecting more, and worse, even though the vilest seemed to have already happened. It didn’t come to anything worse but the anticipation made tense reading. Beck’s eventual salvation comes as a relief but also somewhat as a surprise.
Mal Peet died before he could complete Beck but the manuscript was finished by Meg Rosoff. Rosoff states that she can’t remember which parts were written by whom. To me, it felt a little uneven, with a front-loading of tragedy followed by an ethereal spiritual ending. Perhaps the rich descriptive scenes, reminiscent of Tamar, are Peet’s and the telling of the unorthodox relationship between Beck and Grace, like the unions in how I live now and Just in Case, is Rosoff’s – but it’s only speculation. The sad fact is that readers have lost Mal Peet and we won’t see any more of his genius.
Reviewed by Pam Harvey