ADOLESCENCE IS ONE OF those turbulent periods that cries out for fiction, to show us the way forward and to look back on in wonder. Strangely, there are very few novels that capture this experience. Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, published in 2004, is one of the handful of novels that, like Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, accurately conveys the strength and pain of being young.

Set in the near future, it is narrated by a 15-year-old American, Daisy, who tells how she fell in love with her cousin Edmond when sent to live with her aunt in the English countryside. After a few idyllic weeks together the lovers are separated when Britain is invaded.

Daisy and Edmond’s young sister, Piper, have to find their way back to the farm, suffering both physically and emotionally, before they are able to see whether the rest of the family has survived.

It was an unforgettable story that struck a particular chord as Britain entered the Iraq War. Daisy’s agony as she battled with lost love and extreme hunger corresponded with scenes of horror and brutality of a kind that were to become all too familiar on our television screens. Rosoff’s novel became an international bestseller, a genuine crossover book for teenagers and adults. Written in what Mark Haddon called “an absolutely faultless narrative voice”, it was a rare fusion of the public and the private.

This, inevitably, meant that it was going to be a hard act to follow. Many readers were hoping for How I Live Now 2. Her second novel, Just In Case, is not a sequel, and the author adds a “stern reminder” as a postscript to this effect, although relents enough to say that “in a parallel literary universe, Justin Case might have made an excellent boyfriend for Daisy”. Where Daisy had anorexia, Justin’s problems are more existential. He thinks Fate is out to get him.

Justin begins his story as David, a teenage boy. Left in charge of his little brother Charlie, he lunges forwards just in time to stop the toddler trying to “fly” out of the window. There were “just two seconds . . . between normal, everyday life and utter, total catastrophe”.

The realisation plunges him into paranoia or, as Rosoff puts it, “a particularly severe case of adolescence”. He changes his name to Justin and acquires an eccentric photographer girlfriend called Agnes. “Don’t you think you’re taking this doomed youth thing a little too seriously?” she asks. “Try living it,” he replies.

Gorgeous, messed-up Justin has entered a universe reminiscent of both the film Donnie Darko, and Philippa Pearce’s novel, A Dog So Small. He has a greyhound that isn’t there, is completely confused by sex and discovers that his feelings of impending doom are not altogether crazy when he survives a plane crash at Luton airport. Like Daisy, he finds that sex complicates life. Yet Rosoff is not only taking us, once more, into the head of a troubled teenager. She is strongly influenced by Beckett (one of the chapters in How I Live Now echoes Waiting For Godot’s “we could not go on. We went on.”).

Her characters grapple with problems of mortality, something the author herself encountered between the publication of How I Live Now and the writing of Just In Case in the form of hereditary breast cancer that had killed her mother and one sister. Her characters are individuals whose central dilemma is not love, but the realisation that life will end in death and must somehow be made to mean something, even if God does not exist. In Justin’s case, there is a further metaphysical layer in that the author herself comments on his actions and thoughts, and periodically addresses him, expressing his worst fears, tempting him to give up the game between cause and effect.

Death is a central preoccupation of classic children’s fiction, as it is of children themselves. How we go on choosing to live is something every individual has to discover and, up to a point, repress in order not to go mad. What shimmers in Rosoff’s novels is a very unusual and courageous confrontation with nihilism, which, like Beckett, she makes funny rather than futile. Her spare, ironic style is adept at stepping in and out of people’s heads, so that Justin can occasionally see himself, as mature adults do, though he lacks the capacity to understand that his little brother Charlie is also thinking quite complicated thoughts.

Just in Case is a cooler, more cerebral novel than How I Live Now, deliberately shorn of the passionate romantic ardour that made Daisy’s tale so attractive, and written in the third person not the first. It is unlikely to gain the huge popular appeal of Rosoff’s debut. Yet in describing the existential anguish of adolescence, and its unique mixture of absurdity and anger, it is a modern The Catcher in the Rye. To my mind, Rosoff’s is the better book, written with generosity and warmth but also with an edgy, unpredictable intelligence. Justin, having survived a large-scale disaster, is, like Daisy, in danger of collapsing from within when he gets meningitis, and is offered death by a God-like author, “the source of all your misery and all your delight”.

He chooses life, and the responsibility of loving the child who began his odyssey. The Donnie Darko generation should love it; whether they will is up to Fate.

EXTRACT from JUST IN CASE by Meg Rosoff

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