Tag [Paperback]

Stephen May. Remember the name. You will certainly hear it again.

There is quite a thrill in finding a new writer that you admire (tinged with just a hint of mild envy). TAG is May's debut novel, and quite simply it is stunning.

I'll freely admit, with a hint of shame, that I had some trepidation about reading a novel where the main protagonist was called Mistyann. Now I can happily sneer at my misguided prejudice. Mistyann is a wonderful piece of characterisation.

TAG [acronym for Talented and Gifted] tells the story of fifteen year old Mistyann, a troubled, unpredictable, foul-mouthed yet gifted child who is selected to attend a residential course for teen prodigies in mid-Wales. She is accompanied for the week by her acerbic forty-something teacher Jon Diamond, a frustrated musician and dried-out alcoholic. In the confined setting of the residential course their lives both unravel through a series of unfortunate events which are in turn both comedic and emotionally-charged.

May eschews a linear narrative, and structures his book with deft precision through a series of careful time shifts. He alternates the first person narration between the two main characters, creating utterly believable voices for each of them. He also makes clever use of second person narration with JD effectively addressing Mistyann as if writing her a confessional letter. I'm certain that much of the author's own voice is used for the character of JD, but his real skill is in creating such a rich and authentic voice for the moody and belligerent Mistyann. However May's palette is wider still and even his minor characters crackle with life and realism. By getting under their skins he has an uncanny knack of making you care about his characters and their back stories. He creates a strong ensemble cast and uses them to good effect.

Mistyann's dysfunctional extended family is a good case in point, where May sketches out a believable mother, with her various partners and children without resorting to particularly obvious stereotypes.

May's experiences on Arvon courses have obviously underpinned many of his descriptions of the TAG Residential Course, although I suspect his teaching style may be slightly more orthodox than the American educational psychologist of his novel. I'm quite surprised that he managed to get the Cinnamon Press, (a Welsh independent publishing house) to publish a book which both mocks and ridicules the Welsh at times, so full marks to them for a self-referential sense of humour.

In TAG May bravely tackles a number of difficult subjects, confronting taboos and challenging prejudices. He leaves me convinced that he is a writer to watch out for, and I look forward to his second novel with keen anticipation.

I have a small shelf for books that I want to read again. It is deliberately small and therefore selective. TAG has earnt itself a place. I bought this book having met the author and am so pleased I did. The book has a fast pace and the two alternating voices give the reader a privileged insight into events from two perspectives. I was left pondering the reality of each perspective and wondering 'what really happened' on that retreat for Talented and Gifted children in Wales. There were echoes of Arvon courses, and I loved finding a parody of the speech the author used to make about cooking arrangements in communal living. There are two main characters in this story and a wonderful supporting cast. They are so real that they must be drawn from people the author has encountered. Will any readers of the book recognise themselves?
Overall an excellent read and one I relish re-visiting one dark winter evening.

This is the question at the heart of Stephen May's TAG, the novel that was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year before going on to win the Media Wales Readers' Prize as the one most readers thought should have won. How should teacher Jonathan Diamond see his difficult pupil Mistyann, and how should he behave towards her? Politically correct answers become more difficult when he has to travel alone with her to an isolated manor house in North Wales for a special course aimed at helping Talented and Gifted children.

From the start May lets us know things are going to go wrong: we're just waiting to see how badly he could fall, or if it might all be a comedy of errors. We know Diamond has ended up in disgrace, so we're with him at every moment hoping that he won't do anything too drastic, and for a middle-aged man alone with a precocious teenager that's nerve-wracking. At forty-one, and almost good-looking with some sort of resemblance to Tom Cruise, he's obviously not of the right generation to be a friend to Mistyann. But he's a recovering alcoholic who could be stressed into taking a drink and he was also gifted in his youth, a musician who underachieved, so his empathy is with her rather than with the other staff. He's noncomformist enough to identify more with Mistyann than the system and the rules of behaviour that could protect them both.

The characters are drawn so vividly that readers will remember them as real people they watched through this darkly comic drama. It's not surprising to find that May is also a playwright, and he has obviously studied teenagers to create Mistyann and the others on the Talented and Gifted residential course. The chapters are written in first person narrative alternately by Diamond and Mistyann, and it's quite an achievement how May can make us believe it's a 15-year-old girl talking. She's no Lolita, as teenagers in this millennium happily call out `perv' or `paedo' at the first sign of any suspect behaviour, and in this book they often do.

While Diamond bungles step-by-step towards the court scene we hear about in the early chapters, we meet more characters drawn with the playwright's penetrating vision of human behaviour. The American ed-psych guru Ariel La Rock is almost too easy a target, and the couple running manor are beautifully brought to life - the feeble and boyscoutish Ray who has brought back a feisty Asian wife called Susie from extensive travels where he was `finding himself'.

It's not easy to write well about teenagers, and the other students invited on the course are as believable as Mistyann. Clearly chosen for politically correct criteria rather than for purely academic reasons, they include the selection of races and the boy in the wheelchair that might mark them out as the `right sort of characters' for an all-inclusive children's book these days. As they get to know each other teenage sex is soon on the agenda and, again, May manages to write these scenes incredibly well. Being explicit while still avoiding the pitfalls is a challenge and it takes a brave writer to confront it.

Bringing teenage sex in also raises more discussions, such as why we should consider Mistyann a child but still feel it's right and normal for the kids to have relationships between themselves. The lovelessness of these relationships is also moving and made me step away from the book to think about our society - and I love it when a book makes me take time aside to meditate on the themes. Another question is about why it feels so troubling that Diamond is at risk of overstepping the boundaries with Mistyann, while somehow it's just comical if a young female teacher gets involved with a teenage boy.

There's so much more in TAG: the family Mistyann comes from with the serial relationships of her mother and the way responsibility for looking after the children and cooking has fallen to her. There's a whole vision of the way we're expecting teenagers to live today, not to mention the confusion of the adults. May never comments on any of this: he just brings it to life and different readers will draw different conclusions to me, but it will make all readers think.

Is a 15-year-old girl a child? Yes, she is, even though the explicit sex and the risk of pregnancy show she's old enough to be a mother, and she's also a better mother than her own one as we can see when she looks after her siblings. Are most men attracted to 15-year-old girls as a group of highly intelligent men in a book discussion group told me recently? Possibly. If so May is brave in revealing this when he does cross that line at times to show us what Diamond finds himself thinking, almost despite his conscious decisions. May pushes the boundaries of what's acceptable in this novel, in a way that few novelists do when talking about underaged characters. But sometimes you have to push that boundary to raise the discussion of how we should look after these children. The portrayal of how good a teenage mother could be was also welcome.