Shelley is a single mother in desperate straits. Exhausted by six children under twelve years old, Shelley’s daily drudgery slips into nightmare when her oldest, Joey, is implicated in the horrific burning of a baby. All too soon the horror and chaos within takes substantial form on the streets as Shelley and her children have to flee an angry mob. They find ‘refuge’ in a remote Dartmoor farm and it seems as if the fragile family might begin to stabilise. However, Eden is, as always, filled with serpents and the countryside proves home to a chilling evil.
A psychological thriller, Refuge, succeeds in getting inside the mind of an
‘ordinary’ mother driven beyond bearable social situations. Shelley is a believably
complex character who draws us into the tension of intolerable events. Unsurprisingly,
this is a novel about the intensities of the parent child bond. It exploit’s
the ambivalence of post Bulger Britain about the innocence of children and cleverly
embroils the reader in the dynamics of a family with much love, but not enough
support. The loss of innocence is also one of setting. As the countryside refuses
to provide a secure place of escape from the human problem of crime and cruelty,
so the novel digs deeper into contemporary fears about ‘nature’ and the nature
of rural England.
------
Susan Rowland