Confronting life, death, and one of God's messengers

Nick Farlowe, who narrates his story in P.J. Murphy’s novel Yesterday’s Shadow, is sixteen years old in 1999. He lives in Cambridge, England, with his father, a fork-lift operator, and his mother, who commutes to London for her office job. He’s a high school student, does his homework faithfully, reads science fiction, plays war games with his buddies, and often cowers in his bed at night listening to his father punch out his mother. Until the night in Chapter 1 when Nick comes downstairs and gets into it. His father knocks him down, splitting his lip. That’s finally enough for his mother. She files for divorce and Nick’s father disappears.

That and a school fight are the most dramatic incidents in Yesterday’s Shadow. The novel is a well-written and interesting account of this pivotal year in Nick’s life. I found the evocation of white, middle-class, teen-age angst in England at the end of the century mostly convincing. Nick and his three buddies, however, seem to spend much less time obsessing over girls than my friends and I did at that age.

Nick does think about religion. His mother is a tepid Church of England adherent, and one senses that Nick wants to believe in something greater than what he knows. He connects with an old man, Peter, who is a Christian zealot. Readers who are believing Christians (as opposed to social Christians) will find Peter’s efforts to influence Nick’s belief’s positive.

Readers who are neither Christian nor believers will find Peter’s views extreme. For example, he preaches that “leading a good life is not enough. We will [all] be condemned as sinners on the Day of Judgement.” Nick at sixteen is not sophisticated enough to see the flaw in thinking that “If someone believed in something that strongly, it had to have some truth to it.” 

Yesterday’s Shadow is thought-provoking and well-written. Anyone who has been sixteen and struggled with the big questions—Why am I here? What is true? What is real?—will sympathize with, and possibly identify with, Nick’s journey.