Sixteen is a pivotal age, stranded between childhood and adulthood. At sixteen life ranges from ecstasy to despair and the cause of the emotion can be trivial or momentous. I remember wanting to be taken seriously, to be treated more as an adult than a child. To be free to make my own decisions for the course of my life. But of course, along with the freedom of decision, comes responsibility and consequences for those choices.

In Katherine Marple’s novel, Okay, the sixteen-year-old unnamed female protagonist makes choices which swiftly alter the course of her life, and takes her best friend, and protector, London with her. After setting up the pair as best friends, living in the same neighborhood, in the same style homes, the differences are revealed. London has a loving, supportive family to come home to, while the protagonist fears her alcoholic, abusive father. Coming home late from a graduation party with London, the protagonist attempts to sneak into the house avoiding her father’s wrath, unsuccessfully. When he has beaten and choked her, and threatened her with more abuse and potential rape, the protagonist runs to her best friend to enlist his help.

“Please,” I begged. “Let’s go now.”
He solemnly nodded his head, stroked my hair, and whispered, “Okay.”

Having convinced London to abandon his loving home, his college career, and essentially his future to run away with her, the protagonist wastes no time in making bad decision after bad decision along the way. Drugs, alcohol, and sex with relative strangers, and all the while London is there to pick up the pieces. The protagonist is on a roller coaster of emotion from the freedom of living a life she has never known before to the despair over some of the choices she has made.

Marple presents a strong, clear point of view with her unnamed protagonist, and while I found the pacing to be a little quick, lacking in emotional depth with the heavy topics the book covers, the voice is unwavering and draws the reader along. For the bulk of the book, the lack of a name for the main character was not an issue, but a few times felt a bit gimmicky. The narrator herself explains the lack of name.

My name isn’t important. What is important is helping someone hope for a better view, at the end of his pain. That is the purpose of my story; to help someone heal.

When I first began reading Separation by Ben Bell, I thought it was going to be another collection of short stories.  My reasoning was because of the stream of consciousness-type inner dialog that the reader is presented with on page one.  Dan Crake, the main character, is waking up and getting ready to go out with a friend.

Right away, I like Dan.  He’s a fun guy.  His British dialect and humor comes across immediately.  The author has done a superb job of setting up the reader in place and time, and his protagonist is someone he knows well – coming alive on the page and warming up to the reader making Dan someone we’d like to know too. Like the book description on Lulu says, Dan definitely has an eccentric edge. Here’s a taste of Dan’s world…

Put the cans in the fridge, nuke the burger, teaspoon for my trifle. Whoa, they’ll make a Jamie Oliver outta you yet! Right, upstairs, loud music on, gotta get myself in the mood for getting the hell outta here and into the social world…Oh, not too bad, albeit singed around the edges. Ha ha, this is pitiful man, get it down ya. Hip hop bellows through the ceiling, the drumbeat pounding in faithful rhythm. Makes the house feel alive for once, lived in. Should’ve got some chips to go with this, ah well, I think there’s some in the fridge but can’t be arsed to wait twenty minutes. I want my food now, before it’s out the wrapper. I want my McDonald’s to be fired at me from behind the counter like one of those tennis ball machines. Now that would be fast-food.

We soon settle into a more serious side of Dan when we learn that his mother has passed away.  The author provides a nice balance, and extreme opposite, to the two sides of Dan’s life which we are treated to.  When he’s out with his friends the book is very upbeat and almost poetic.  It is fast paced with lots of dialog. But as Dan grieves for his mother, and even isolates himself inside his mind from the outside world due to an upcoming meeting with his distant father, he becomes a much more complex character than we probably imagined him to be in the beginning.

When I read a book like this with a first person narrative, and I get to know the main character in his mind and in his real world, I always wonder if he’s lying to us.  I don’t always want to trust him.  I guess that’s just the writer in me questioning whether or not Dan is telling me all that I really need to know.  After all, in one chapter we’re seeing him deal with recent family matters, and in the next he’s out with his buds in a club.  To me, Ben Bell has created a genius complex character in Dan which I haven’t seen the likes of since Brian Pera’s Troublemaker. I believe that Dan himself sums it up nicely in a quote where he is describing the odd mix of culture at the bar:

There’s kind of a divide between sets of people, or stereotypes, that is always present here, like there is everywhere. But just with these two floors, there’s the hiphop vibe, with loose clothes and crowds of blokes like Chris, and the whole graffiti, skater culture vibe. And then there’s the top floor, with androgynous types, and metal moshers and goths and more outrageous dress senses. Not like it’s that straight forward, I mean you’ve got everyone in-between on both floors and mix ‘n’ matching goes on. But the divide is still evident.

The divide in Dan’s own life is indeed evident to the reader, but it doesn’t keep you from wanting to know just what the outcome will be.  How will Dan cope as he takes a girl, Jo, home from the bar for a night of passion, then spirals into a trip down memory lane recalling a trip to the beach with his Mom?

The book culminates with a much calmer Dan than we met at the beginning.  He is spending time with his father and they are going to go to a museum together. Dan’s thoughts are on another girl named Anna, and he recalls the first time he went back to his mother’s grave. There is a quote at the end which I believe sums up the story quite nicely:

Feel a bit disorientated with everyone’s swift moving, but in a good way. We enter the bright white light of the station’s arena. I look way up to the glass roofing, criss-crossed with a million bars and beams, sun shining through, blinding. People everywhere, like insects on this huge shiny floor, spilled out from life’s daily jar.

Separation is a story about the things that happen to us when we wish we could either fast forward through life or rewind it and prevent the bad things from happening to us which smack us hard in the face to remind us what life is all about in the first place.  Kudos to Ben Bell for giving such a life lesson a new twist, and reinventing it on the page with an enjoyable character like Dan.  No matter where you are on your own journey, this is a book you should definitely read somewhere along the way.

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