Revisiting a book read in school
Sometimes a pretty crap book that your teacher makes you read can be successful in evoking emotions within you, even years after reading it. For me, that book was Stone Cold, by Robert Swindells.
I was initially going to write about a book like Jane Eyre or 1984, or a book that more people have probably heard of/read but those books are talked about far more often than Stone Cold so I thought I’d talk about this wonderful flawed mess of a book.
I first read this book more than 5 years ago and I can honestly say I think about it often. The story is told in a dual narrative, with one of the narratives following a boy named Link who has recently been made homeless showing him trying to survive on the streets and the other juxtaposing narrative following an anonymous ex-soldier going by “Shelter” who has made it his mission to slowly rid the streets of London of homeless people. It’s exactly what it sounds like.
This book made me sad when I first read it and rereading it made me feel even worse, with its depiction of how humans are able to justify their actions to themselves and claim they’re for the greater good.
It somewhat humanizes Link and the other homeless characters we meet whilst also portraying a morbid and almost dystopian treatment of them. Though the style is not my cup of tea, I must now acknowledge the fact that Swindells is able to perfectly give a glimpse into these characters lives whilst also keeping an eerily realistic distance, by only showing us snippets of these characters. I felt like I was only getting a glance of these characters as I passed them by.
What stuck with me the most was that this story, as disgusting as it felt at times, felt entirely possible. I have no clue why it’s targeted at 12-16 year olds when all of us could benefit from picking it up, even if it’s just to make us more aware of our own humanity.
“Homeless in Sugamo 1” by jamesfischer is licensed under CC BY 2.0.