Gillian Dorricott

YOUR BLUE EYED BOY

by Helen Dunmore

Viking, #12.99

YOU may imagine Helen

Dunmore sitting snuggly between Janice Galloway and Margaret Atwood. Galloway is great at observation and recreating the details of life, but her novels aren't exactly action-packed. Atwood is also good at observation, but is not so obsessed with detail. She injects a little more verve into her stor-ies and characters. Things

move along at a swifter pace. Dunmore tends to settle somewhere between these two approaches. Her fairly gentle and cerebral attitude may not immediately suggest a riveting read, but her work has qualities that may even appeal to thrill-seeking readers.

Your Blue Eyed Boy tells the story of Simone, whose job it is to ''make sense of things that really don't make sense at all''. She is a district judge who decides who is victim and who is perpetrator, who is innocent and who is guilty. Simone's strength and resilience lie at the heart of the novel and create its vitality. She is like a female animal, wily and resourceful and protective of her family. She is a survivor. However, her survival instincts are tested when a figure from her past re-emerges. She must deal with him or he may destroy her present life and career. In the meantime, she must also deal with her children, her husband, the family's substantial business debt, and her demanding job of passing judgment on other people.

Your Blue Eyed Boy is a disconcerting exploration of blackmail and the quiet, creeping way it can infiltrate a life. In essence, Simone's enemy is her former self, who acted in ways that threaten her present existence. In Dunmore's novel, everyone must face their past and their enemy within. Blackmail ''is always an inside job, the most intimate of crimes . . . you begin to realise that it will never go away. The more you feed it, the stronger it grows. Why should you feel guilty, unless you've got something to hide?''

Against this persistent psychological backdrop, Dunmore places descriptions of the sea, the weather rolling in across the waves and the marshes and the sea wall in six or seven different kinds of rain. She takes the time to describe the particular quality of the light in specific places at specific points in time.

Her plot is simple, mostly remembered rather than lived. However, although Your Blue Eyed Boy is far from dynamic, Dunmore gets away with it. The observations and descriptions that pepper the stories of less accomplished writers are often there for their own sake. With Dunmore, everything is there for a reason.