The War Zone

Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Hardcover first edition - New York:: Doubleday,, (1989.). Hardcover first edition -. Fine in a near fine dust jacket.. First US printing. Screenwriter's very highly praised second novel: Anthony Burgess stated "The War Zone is a pungent, shocking book, superbly written.I was horrified but seduced from first to last." A controversial novel, this was awarded the prestigious Whitbread Prize, but the award was revoked when on judge complained of its treatment of incest. Basis for the 1999 film of the same name which was Tim Roth's directoral debut (and for which Stuart wrote the screenplay) and which one reviewer called the best movie of 1999, praising it for its incredible daring and its brutal but honest portrayal of the subject of sexual abuse and incest. Like the movie, this book is perhaps too honest to be "commercially sucessful" but it is a well-written book about an often unrecognized but devasting "war zone" - that is, inside a seemingly happy family.

A photo of children in bomb-torn Beirut hangs in the bedroom of Tom, the adolescent narrator of this taut, gripping novel by a young British writer. The war zone of the title, however, is the seemingly tranquil village in Devon where Tom and his family have moved from London. Bored and restless, Tom at first seems a contemporary Holden Caulfield, possessed of an urge to do mischief to establish his identity. But as he relates the circumstances that transform his lifehis discovery of the incestuous relationship between his father and his older sister Jessiethe novel reveals its sinister, shocking theme. Because he and Jessie have always been close, the situation feels like a double betrayal to Tom, who also realizes that to reveal the bizarre secret to his mother, preoccupied with a new baby, will destroy them all. In electrically tense prose, Stuart succeeds in enveloping the reader in the surcharged atmosphere of sexual perversion. Although Tom's painful emotional limbo is effectively conveyed, however, Stuart's portrayal of Jessie is less successful. The young woman's cool, nervy manipulation of her father and Tom, her determination to engage in every form of sexual experience, is meant to mirror the "corrupt, repressive" society of Thatcher's England, but Jessie loses her credibility as she leads Tom into a maelstrom of depravity and violence. The denouement, containing the rationale for Jessie's behavior, is unconvincing, but until that point the reader is caught up in a riveting tale.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This exciting but distasteful novel is narrated by rebellious, adolescent Tom, scion of a middle-class English family who discovers that his elder sister Jessica is having sexual relations with their father. Simmering with frightening psychological tensions and perverse violence, the novel effectively captures the raw emotions of adolescence in uninhibited language. It finally fails primarily because one cannot believe in the witchlike cunning and amorality of Jessica, on which the plot hinges. And the conclusion, in which Tom ends up having sex with his sister (just like Dad) is too perverse to be satisfying. The fascination the book undoubtedly exerts is due mostly to morbid curiosity about how far the author's odd imagination will take him, and one is left wishing he had put his undoubted talents to more worthwhile use.
- Bryan Aubrey, Fairfield, Ia.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.