Strange Boy, by Paul Magrs

The weird and wonderful world of a child of the Seventies

Childhood in this novel comes over as a strange place, where the older inhabitants seem to behave very oddly towards the young. Parents scheme against each other one moment, then beg for sympathy the next. Loving grandparents suddenly turn jealous and nasty. No wonder 10-year-old David, the main character, tells his estranged father that "you grown-ups are just, like, weird".

This is the twelfth book by Paul Magrs (pronounced Maws), who is still in his thirties. Semi-autobiographical, it recalls a 1970s childhood in the North-east of England. Although David and his younger brother have to cope with an unhappy divorce, both parents love them and vie for their company. The situation is by no means unusually bad, but Magrs conveys the pain behind the bare statistics of parental separation.

He does this while avoiding the modish literary practice of describing childhood misery through the dark-tinted glasses of mawkish adult reconstruction. David instead shows the quicksilver changes of mood and interest typical of his age. He is fascinated by everything around him. Comics, Basil Brush and prize trolley dashes at the new supermarket are all grist to his wonder at the outlandish variability of what, for others, passes for the dull old normal world.

Like Leo in LP Hartley's The Go-Between, David believes he possesses magical powers. At one moment these actually work – the only false note in an otherwise compelling narrative. David also finds himself sexually aroused by his older friend John, an unhappy loner with a half-mad mother.

Already different from other boys his age because of his intelligence, there are hints that one day David may differ in his sexual orientation. But the polymorphous sexuality of his male peers at school is a reminder of the fluidity, in every sense, of passions at this age. David has to find his own way, drawing on the courage that helps him to renounce his immature father – one of a series of characters who are neither villains nor heroes, but flawed humans.

Books for older children sometimes reach out hopefully for adult readers. But it is less common for an essentially adult novel to look towards the children's market, making the decision to place this book on the youth list all the more baffling. Strange Boy is a novel about childhood, rather than a children's novel.

Like Michael Frayn's Spies, it is fascinated by the unstable mixture of ignorance and experience, logic and emotion, fantasy and realism, typical of pre-adolescent thinking. Children tend to prefer firmer boundaries, impatient with descriptions of immature characteristics they have yet to recognise. Their interest in recent history is also limited, which suggests that the entertaining 1970s glossary may be more enjoyed by adults, always happy to be reminded so stylishly of favourites such as Crossroads and sticker albums. The rest of the book is equally good, and most certainly deserves to be read.