Then there’s the robbery. I won’t tell you how it turns out. But Ford is superb at suspense. Twice in the book, you know something very bad is going to happen. You just don’t know quite when, or quite how. At first, Dell spots cars cruising past his home, over and over. Then, after his parents have been away on their mysterious trip, they act oddly — and, in fact, are never the same again. Ford captures exactly the way people in trouble never give you a straight answer. There’s a lovely scene, as the tension approaches breaking point, when Dell watches his father, Bev, try to complete a jigsaw puzzle. On the face of it, Bev is a dreadful man — dishonest and self-important. But Ford tells you lots of perfectly-placed details about him; he makes you see him through Dell’s eyes. And weirdly, you feel for him. This is a book about dysfunctional lives in a bleak North America that existed half a century ago — it sometimes has the feel of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. What a backdrop — you feel as if anything might happen here. It’s like the last knockings of the Wild West. In the aftermath of the crime, Dell escapes across the border into Canada, where life is even more marginal. Here people live in shacks, shoot geese and deer — and eventually, at the book’s climax, each other.
