“Young adult novel” is often code for “bad fiction for teenagers”. Not this time, though. Songlight is the first in an ambitious new trilogy that will appeal to any adult, young or not so young, who likes their dystopias to come with a clever concept, an intricate plot and lashings and lashings of secret telepathy.
Set in the far distant future, this story owes as much to John Wyndham’s 1955 sci-fi novel The Chrysalids as it does to The Handmaid’s Tale. Human civilisation has wiped itself out and the scattered, isolated societies that remain are at war. In the joyless fishing town of Northaven, where difference is not tolerated and young girls face only three kinds of future — as a first wife, a second wife or a forcibly sterilised “comfort woman” in the brothels known as Pink Houses — the teenage Lark is harbouring the biggest secret of all. She has “songlight”, the ability to connect telepathically with others. The controlling elders hate this sixth sense and denounce anyone capable of such treacherous freedom of thought as “unhuman”, casting them to the Chrysalid House where they are effectively lobotomised and enslaved.
I loved the creepy image of former loved ones who, once recast as Chrysalids, return to society as blank-eyed servants in gauze masks. There’s also a deliciously scheming villain in Sister Swan, the beautiful propagandist known as the Flower of Brightland.
Lark is not alone. When her illicit relationship with a local boy is discovered, she howls in grief and rage across the sea — “I roar with white, inchoate pain” — in songlight so strong it scatters birds and catches the attention of a stranger, far, far away. Is this new contact, who goes by the name Nightingale, friend or foe? Why is her songlight so strong? Each, they discover, is in danger. They forge a friendship that could get them killed.
In the hands of a lesser writer, this network of spies and double agents who are all using telepathy to build trust or betray each other would risk becoming a discordant mess, but Moira Buffini pulls it off superbly. This is the dramatist’s first novel — her screenwriting credits include The Dig, starring Carey Mulligan, and the 2010 rom-com Tamara Drewe with Gemma Arterton. There’s a cinematic sweep to the action, which has the guts to eschew battles and explosions for the much more sophisticated drama that comes from the fragile peace-making between two distrusting sides. It is meaty and mesmerising.
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Songlight (14+) by Moira Buffini (Faber £8.99 461pp). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
