Jules Jones

This isn't a review. It's just a note that over the last three days I have read Chaz Brenchley's new novel "Being Small" and that it is very good. And furthermore, that I may not be able to review it properly, at least not for those who come to it knowing nothing about Chaz himself. Usually I make a note to say that Chaz is a friend, merely to indicate that yes I may be biased. Here it matters for quite a different reason that I know something about the author. For I was reading it with an eerie double vision, both the words on the page before me, and the words I have seen Chaz write elsewhere.

This is fiction, not a memoir. Yet there are things in it that are taken very much from real life, even if melted and twisted and hammered and tempered in the way that a writer does; and not all of them are obvious. The obvious is Quin, because Chaz has written about Quin's dying before, and more than once. The less obvious is... well, there's a scene where the two boys go to a shop. There's a two for one offer. And I knew before it was stated what that two for one offer was for, and what the boys would do with it. My blood ran cold, not because of anything in the book, but because of the ore that scene was smelted from. A handful of words Chaz has written here and there, and some of them too damn close to home for me. There are the words on the page, and then there are the words elsewhere, laying a hazy film atop the page; a gossamer veil that I can see all too clearly, and yet not show to those who cannot already see it for themselves.

We each of us have our own reading of a book. This one is mine.