Sunshine to the Sunless
by Gareth Thompson

Release Date: 7th Feb 2008
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 978 1 862 30467 3
RRP: £5.99

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As a previous advocate of Thompson’s The Great Harlequin Grim due to it being a far cry from your average teenage fiction, I was looking forward in anticipation of his latest offering. Thompson, at first glance however, appears to return to type with Sunshine to the Sunless.

Andrew Kindness is fifteen. He comes from a broken family, with a dad called “Razzler” (which can only be construed one way and is probably the cause of his mother’s eventual departure) and a hippy-chick mum, he is perhaps not the customary whippersnapper but then conventional isn’t interesting and if Andy weren’t interesting we wouldn’t be reading about him.

Andy is a maudlin boy, predisposed to allowing himself to wallow in past events when he witnessed a man and his son being swallowed up in the quicksand in the bay near his home. I suppose it is understandable that this event would have traumatised him in some way, but for some reason I just can’t bring myself to feel any sympathy for Andy. His need for Orange Flyer (his skateboard) in order to stay just that little bit higher off the ground is more pathetic than quaint and I cannot help but feel that somewhere along the line, Andy should have been bullied at school. But bullying doesn’t come into it at all. Instead, Andy has a preoccupation with girls and the various urges and physical reactions they cause him. It’s all a little bit sullied and embarrassing at times.

There is an overwhelming prevalence of the daffodil – as in the flower. Indeed, daffodils are very much the life and soul of this book – more so than any of the individual characters, which is a shame because Thompson did characterisation so well in Harlequin Grim. There are great chunks of text that will turn off anyone without a fondness for flora and - dare I say it – these can always be ‘skipped’ in favour of the actual storyline.

Ah – the storyline. This is difficult to describe, but in a nutshell, it is about Andy’s antithesis of a life and some bizarre events involving the local gangster, Malky, and dual-personality, Angie (who also happens to be his unrequited love) that finally draw him out of himself and let him finally live. It was an odd sensation of quiet relief at the end when I discovered that the end was Andy’s beginning – the beginning of hope, of a future, of life.

Sunshine to the Sunless won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but that’s not such a bad thing. It is the kind of peculiar book that unexpectedly grows on you though, and I will probably read it again – unlike many, many books I have read.

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