Your Fault
ANDREW COWAN
(Salt, 208 PP, £12.99)
tablet bookshop price £11.69 • tel 020 7799 4064
Andrew Cowan’s fifth novel revisits some of the territory he explores in his first, the wonderful, award-winning Pig, based on his own childhood in Corby and his relationship with his grandparents. Your Fault is also set in a new town dominated by a steelworks, and it reads much more like a memoir than Pig, though at one step removed. Cowan uses the second-person singular throughout, which has the curious effect of being both intimate and remote.
We follow Peter’s childhood methodically from his earliest memory at the age of two – a tantrum in the street as his mother strides away from him, pushing his baby sister in the pram: “You bawl at your mother and wait for your future to reach you, a future you do not want but cannot prevent” – to the age of 13, when that future, and its accompanying tragedy, catches up with him. But a disturbing uncertainty prevails
– “Your name, then, is Peter – let’s settle on that” – as though, in fact, nothing is settled.