Sarah J. Harris - The Colour Of Bee Larkham's Murder

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Disappointing

I’m afraid I didn’t think that The Colour Of Bee Larkham’s Murder was all that good. I feel churlish saying it because it’s written with good intentions, but it just didn’t work for me.

The book is narrated by Jasper, a 13-year-old who has autism and synesthesia, so that he cannot recognise faces and experiences sounds and some other senses as colours. He has a very patchy memory and is convinced that he killed his neighbour, the eponymous Bee Larkham. The plot, which moves extremely slowly, is the emergence of the events leading up to Bee’s possible murder (we don’t know the truth for a long time) intercut with Jasper’s day-to-day perception of the events in his life.

Plenty of people have loved the book, and fair enough. It’s certainly not exploitative, it’s an original viewpoint and it is well-intentioned – although I did feel that there was some over-sentimental emotional manipulation at times. The main problem for me, though, is that Jasper’s voice just didn’t ring true as that of a 13-year-old. Just as an example, at one point he says,

“...I walked into his bedroom. He put his real book behind the cover of Lee Child’s.

Understanding Your Child’s Autism And Other Learning Difficulties.

I expect he’s studying it right now. Trying to get a grip on why I’m difficult. Why I’m different from other teenage boys.

Why I’m so hard to love.”

The use of paragraphs especially is a technique of an adult author trying to make a punchy point and to me it really isn’t the voice of a bemused young teenager. I found this throughout the book and that, combined with a rather stodgily paced story prevented me from becoming involved.

There have been some superb books written from the point of view of narrators with various mental health problems – Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident..., of course, and Nathan Filer’s The Shock of the Fall, Holly Bourne’s Am I Normal Yet?, Gavin Extence’s The Mirror World Of Melody Black and others spring to mind. This isn’t in their league, I’m afraid, and I can only give it a very qualified recommendation.

(My thanks to HarperCollins for an ARC via NetGalley.)