The Uninvited by Liz Jensen

Previously published in the Express Tribune Magazine. 

Violent children are always disturbing: perhaps its the idea of innocence lost so early that is frightening, perhaps because it is so unexpected to find very young children as perpetrators of vicious, bloody murders. Either way, extreme violence from a child as the premise for a book is enough to either entirely repulse or entirely entrance a reader depending on how well it’s written. Liz Jensen, however, writes with precision fluidity in her latest book The Uninvited, beginning with the protagonist’s recollection of ‘when a young child in butterfly pyjamas slaughtered her grandmother with a nail-gun to the neck…No reason, no warning.’ 

Narrated by Hesketh Lock, a consultant for a global troubleshooting company, the story follows what becomes a series of violent spates by children, and corporate sabotage by adults claiming they didn’t act on their own behalf. Hesketh is an entirely reliable narrator - his particular Asperger’s Syndrome makes him incapable of lying or even imagining anything beyond the absolute empirical reality. He explains ‘my contract with the world holds that there are no secrets we can’t unlock, with persistence and time, because everything has a precedent,’ yet when his adored stepson is involved in a shocking murder forcing a sudden but clear shift in the paradigm he recognises, Hesketh can not remain a purely disengaged observer. It’s an odd book that relies on an unemotional, ‘robot made of meat’ narrator to tell its story, and it should be hard to connect with Hesketh as he tries to navigate society without understanding many of the social cues that people around him immediately pick up on - and yet its not. This is again a testament to Jensen’s simple, effective prose - this is a book with many frightening aspects, one being how easy it is to read and accept what is being suggested because ‘whatever is shaking the foundations of the reality we know, it is something we have summoned.’ 

All over the world these changeling children appear to be forcing global society and economy into ruin. Hesketh attempts to understand why children appear to be retreating into a world of their own making after murdering their family members, a ‘world with no adults, no toilets. no fresh food, a world with its own landscape, and props, its minerals, its food sources, its rites and rituals, its gestural password, its hierarchies, its own unassailable imperatives’. The Uninvited is perfect cerebral horror - while there may be blood and violence, what is ultimately frightening is what the future holds for a ‘species in crisis: a species on the brink of collapse.’

As with some of Jensen’s previous books, The Uninvited too has elements of an eco-thriller and of a prelude to dystopia, built from many different mythological cultures. There is the suggestion of the Gaia hypothesis - that everything in the world co-evolves with its environment, in this case, leading to a frightening but highly possible future because ‘human history is a juggernaut. If it’s to change direction, it must first come to a stop,’ making this a quiet, compact, creepy little cautionary tale completely relevant to modern society.