The Little Friend

A mere pinpoint in his face, but gleaming like a crumb of glass." That's Long John Silver's eye, in Treasure Island, just before the smiling pirate suddenly commits a murder. "From beneath a slick, lashless eyelid, the preacher's eye sparkled, colourfully, like a blue chip of glass." That's a close-up by Donna Tartt of one of a family of Mississippi rednecks just as dangerous as Robert Louis Stevenson's pirates, just as much monsters of impulse and appetite.

Tartt loves Stevenson, and her long-awaited follow-up to The Secret History pays complex homage to him. He's not an obvious influence to bring to a thickly-specified novel of family and place, even if the place is a Mississippi town in the 1970s, still soaked in the Gothic possibilities of the Old South. Stevenson was a master of the vivid, reaching through vividness to play directly on a reader's sense of fear and wonder.

When Tartt blends Stevenson's flashing sensibility with a more patient attention to character and atmosphere, it makes things glow strangely. The sky over Alexandria, Mississippi shines lavender, stormy yellow, enamel blue, like a colour film developed too far; objects radiate in the dark like jewels.

But then, it wasn't an obvious move either to write a novel about a group of liberal-arts students committing a Bacchanalian murder. One of the most reassuring aspects of Tartt's phenomenal success is that she is clearly writing exactly the novels she wants to write.

There's also a psychological reason for Stevenson's presence. Tartt loves him; so does the 12-year-old protagonist of The Little Friend, Harriet Cleve Dufresnes.

When she was a baby, Harriet's brother Robin was found hanged under the tupelo tree in the garden. Grief over this still-unexplained death has sent Harriet's faded gentry family reeling. But it fills Harriet, who can't remember the living Robin, with a disastrous feeling that Something Must Be Done, the killer must be identified.

She is a blunt, clever, dogmatic, humourless child, more Wednesday Addams than Scout Finch; and she gets altogether too much of her sense of how the world works from solitary reading about Captain Scott, Harry Houdini, and Long John Silver.

So off she sets. Her weapon is her disconcerting willingness to do the things she's read about. Equipped with it, she blunders out of the protected, largely female world she knows, where her great aunts scent their clothes with vetiver root, and the elderly black housekeepers stomp sourly around the kitchens; out into something much more dangerous.

For outside town, in a cluster of trailers surrounded by rusty car parts, live the Ratliff clan, tending their methamphetamine lab. Farish-Ratliff, the patriarch, has the attentive smile of a dog about to kill a cat.

Danny, 22, thin as a rake, dreams of escaping to be a truck driver but can't get through the day without endless lines of speed. "The icy, disinfectant taste at the back of his throat made him feel clean: everything surface again, everything sparkle on the glossy face of these waters that swept like thunder over a cesspool he was sick to death of..." (It's Stevensonian speed, as you see.)

The Ratliffs are murderous when prodded. But they aren't villains, they aren't flat creatures out of romance: they have their own story, told through Danny's eyes, which Tartt shows is as past-obsessed in its way as the Cleves', and quite as intrinsic to the spirit of the town.