When adults say "children are the future," it's a hopeful acknowledgement that investing in their education and well-being will help them grow up to build a more prosperous, peaceful world. But in British novelist Liz Jensen's The Uninvited, "children are the future" is a warning--and a terrifying inevitability.
The Uninvited begins as a fairly conventional corporate thriller, albeit with an unusual narrator. Hesketh Lock is a brilliant anthropologist with Asperger's Syndrome, a "cross-culture sabotage analyst" at an international PR firm who's dispatched to investigate a bizarre series of cases of corporate sabotage. These cases converge with a second alarming phenomenon: children around the world are attacking and killing adults.
The increasingly apocalyptic plot (which includes demon possession, feral bands of violent children and a paradigm-shifting descent into global chaos) is less compelling than Hesketh's presence as a character. Rigidly logical, with an outsider's illuminating perspective, he uses his scientific observation of human behavior to adapt his own--enabling him to have a romantic relationship with a woman, Kaitlin, and be a father to her young son, Freddy. But the relationship has come to an excruciating end, and Hesketh is grieving the loss of contact with Freddy, who is vulnerable to the pandemic of violence infecting children.
"My contract with the world holds that there are no secrets we can't unlock... because everything has a precedent," Hesketh says as he struggles both to save Freddy and to reconcile his current reality with the rational principles that govern his life.
Jensen depicts Hesketh's interiority with sensitivity, insight and evident knowledge of Asperger's. Most impressively, her finely crafted prose doesn't suffer when filtered through what could be a potentially limited narrator; instead, the challenge elevates her writing and makes The Uninvited both a gripping thriller and a fascinating character study. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice