Product Description

This volume seeks to expose the hollowness of condemnation divorced from understanding in relation to the Bulger murder trial. People have almost become desensitized to random murder. It is often explained away by madness, sexual fantasy or rejection. One murder in recent times reduced every person to silence: the abduction and beating to death of a helpless infant by two ten-year-old boys. How and why did two innocent boys kill another? Is childhood innocence a myth? And what punishment could fit such a crime, assuming that children are fit to stand trial for murder? Blake Morrison went to the trial in Preston, and discovered a sad ritual of condemnation with two bewildered children at the centre. He looked for possible explanations in the boys' families, their dreary environment, their fantasies, their exposure to violent films. He evokes the worst feats of parents through candid and raw memories of his relations with his own children, and delves into his own childhood to reveal the worst thing he has ever done, to show how easy it is to go along with cruelty. Blake Morrison is the author of two collections of poetry, "Dark Glasses" and "The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper", and is co-editor of "The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry". His memoir, "And When Did You Last See Your Father?" won the Waterstone's/Esquire Award for non-fiction and the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography in 1993.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #116543 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
Literary journalist Morrison's reportage of the infamous 1993 child-murder of James Bulger turns into a semi-confessional meditation on illusory childhood innocence and collective guilt. After his revealing and moving patrimonial memoir, And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1995), Morrison moves to murkier ground as he covers the trial of ten-year-old murderers Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. The British trial of the century was supposed to answer the question of why as well as how the pair abducted a two-year-old from a shopping center and killed him after a day of wandering around Liverpool. Reporting for the New Yorker, Morrison is dubious from the outset about the trial - charging the two as adults for murder, the conduct of the police and social services, the legal question of doli incapax, i.e., moral unawareness, and the barely contained public spectacle. Although Morrison was allowed to attend the court proceedings throughout, he does not have much of substance to impart to readers, either about the investigation and evidence or the character of the children and parents involved; the lingering questions about the pair's motives and possible abuse by their own families linger still at book's end. Baffled by the enormity of this crime, Morrison stops trying to re-create the circumstances in his imagination and begins to examine his own conscience about parenthood and childhood. The literary-confessional dimension of As If, occasionally hampered by pretentious allusions, includes his mullings over his experiences of pre-teen sex and a deftly ambiguous description of putting his infant daughter to bed - which, if read from a different angle, could make Humbert blush. A candid challenge to John Major's hardened pronouncement on juvenile crime, "We must condemn a little more, and understand a little less," but with mixed results in the end. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Distressing, yet important
This is a superb book. The author manages to cover the facts of the case, and highlight the unfortunate causes. It not only clarifies the story, but makes the reader feel "dirty". It's frightening to discover how one could possibly understand what happened. It's shocking, in a good way. Everyone should read this.

Thought-provoking and fair
I was interested in this as the Bulger case was one of the cases I covered in my dissertation on the link between violent media and violent acts. I wasn't disappointed.

Although it did touch on the media violence angle, I was pleased that this was a detailed look at the case and our society as a whole.

Starting with a lengthy ramble through the children's crusades, I wondered where this was going, but it made sense once he started talking about the case.

Blake Morrison was at the trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables in Preston, and looks at their backgrounds, influences, the nature of childhood and evil to find out what I wanted to know at the time: why?

There are a few passages I found hard to read (especially one that reads like a sex scene but turns out to be a description of him putting his daughter to bed) but this is a complex book that covers a lot but never strays too far that it loses your attention.

As Morrison illustrates, children can be, and often are cruel.

Through personal anecdotes, fables and factual examples, he looks at why children are portrayed as innocent, when they are far from that, and sets out a calm and fair conclusion that is far more thought-provoking than anything else I've read on the subject.

Truly, an inconvenient truth
Can a book about the brutal murder of a child and the trial of the killers be considered a favourite?

This is one of mine.

The Bulger case is famous and so few will come to this without a preconceived idea about the killers, but this is a book which makes you think in a way you probably never thought you would. Could it be that the two boys who brutally killed another child are not monsters, but just children?

The author not only writes exceptionally well, he offers an eye-witness account of the trial and the key figures, putting himself - and so you - in awkward places, asking awkward questions to search for a truth about us as humans as much as why this terrible thing happened that day.

Highly recommended, but be warned: once read your view might become a minority one and far removed from the screaming Daily Mail mob mentality next time a similar case arises.