The Wrong Boy

Willy Russell

Black Swan, £6.99
ISBN 0 552 99645 9

Rating: ****

Willy Russell has written some cracking plays—notably, Shirley Valentine and Educating Rita. He has a fine eye for human frailty and an ability to create humour out of the blackest, most miserable of situations. In The Wrong Boy, Russell's first novel, he continues to deliver the goods.

Raymond Marks was, by today's definition, an average lad. By his 18th year he is perceived as a social reject, a mental case, and a dirty “perv.” Raymond evolves from an innocent beginning—by a series of unfortunate mishaps and misinterpretations centring on his desire to prove his innocence— into “the wrong boy.” He is taken out of school, forced to leave his home town for fear of a lynching mob, and eventually finds himself in a psychiatric ward. The novel raises, perhaps inadvertently, several questions about the definition and origin of mental illness.

The Wrong Boy gives an insight into a world that many of us—myself included— have never experienced and find difficult to empathise with. Russell does not demand that you feel sorry for Raymond, quite the opposite in fact. As the book progresses, and events seem to snowball and conspire against “the wrong boy,” there is an unsettling feeling that you are laughing because you do not really understand how this has happened and what your response should be. Russell takes the rawest of human emotions and smacks them straight in your face with an injection of humour that heightens the poignancy. Perfect black comedy. He writes with candour about child abuse and allows all aspects of Raymond's story to be heard. He has a strong voice and it is not difficult to guess what he thinks of the whole sorry situation. Whether you agree with him is another thing entirely. I do. By the end of the book the weaknesses of the main character that originally expedited his downfall proved to be the very things that I liked most about him. The pressure always to be seen as a success and never to fail, in public at least, is a ghost that Russell lays to rest in Raymond Marks.

I recommend this book for its combination of humour, vulnerability, and honesty that is delivered in a way that is easy to swallow but takes a lot longer to fully digest.

Rebecca Monks, fifth year medical student, University of Sheffield
Email: doctormonkey@hotmail.com


studentBMJ 2002;10:1-44 February ISSN 0966-6494