Book review: 'Between the Lines'

Between the Lines
Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer
Hodder & Stoughton, 2012
352  pages
Rs695

Bestselling author Jodi Picoult doesn’t do ‘happily ever after’, at least not in the traditional sense.

Her novels, like House Rules or The Tenth Circle are page-turners that address ethical and societal problems, marrying melodrama with morality and stripping the reader of complacent answers.

Which is why her turn to the young adult genre could have signalled the beginning of a new series of raw and moving writing. Sadly, that hasn’t happened with Between The Lines. Sure, it is a young adult novel, co-written with her teenage daughter, Samantha van Leer. There’s a moody, broody, semi-nerdy teenager with the kind of loner baggage that makes this genre tick, but the whole thing feels slick and sanitised, more like a product from the House of Picoult rather than a genuine Picoult novel with the ability to kick you in the guts with heart-rending emotional conflict.

Fifteen-year-old Delilah is hopelessly attracted to a children’s fairy tale. She simply cannot put it down, particularly when the perfectly handsome prince named Oliver in the fairy tale etches “help me” on a rock face and stares out at Delilah through a page of illustration. It’s a compelling concept — albeit reminiscent of a vintage A-ha video. Remember Take On Me? — and one that is bound to resonate with most readers who have fallen in love with a book or a fictional character. Delilah must set the prince free of the confines of the book so that he can live a proper life where his lines are his own and his happy ending is not predetermined.

The prince’s life unfolds along two parallel lines. We see him mouth the lines as prescribed by the fairy tale, and then we see him as an independent agent, living with other fairy tale characters and attempting to find a way to exit the book. Meanwhile, for Delilah there’s high school, her mother’s feelings, and peer humiliation to be faced.

Between The Lines has all the ingredients for making an interesting book. Roland Barthes declared the author was dead, and that a book lives irrespective of authorial intentions. Picoult and Samantha van Leer take it a step further and suggest characters — the embodiments of the intentions and ideas contained in a story — are alive and enslaved by the book an author writes. They are waiting to be set free by a reader who can read between the lines. Unfortunately, the authors settle for glib resolutions. There are minor tremors in the plot line as Oliver and Delilah make failed attempts at escape, though one wonders why they panic at all — “happily ever after” is a given.

The avoidance of all complexity and penetration makes this an easily digested, easily forgotten read. Everything is smoothed over in the end, however improbably, much in the manner of fairy tales. If the premise was charming, the conclusion borders on specious. My suggestion: do not put this on your crossover young adult fiction