Silence of the children

This book is really a collection of six, extraordinary individual histories, beautifully navigated, but agitated sometimes by the author's slightly nervous sense that he should be coaxing them on towards some wider conclusion, some larger pattern of significance. Which is unnecessary, because the six stories, as he tells them here, already revolve around some of the largest questions there can be. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be wild? What does it mean to speak, and not to speak? The children Michael Newton focuses on were "feral" in different ways. Peter, the "Wild Boy" at the court of George I, came out of the forests of Hanover; like Victor, captured in the woods near Aveyron later in the 18th century, he must have been an abandoned baby, who somehow successfully adapted to a life in the trees beyond Europe's ploughed fields. "Memmie le Blanc", lured at the age of 10 out of a tree in Champagne in 1731, seems to have been a Native American, dumped in France by the vagaries of the Atlantic slave trade. She had weapons and a medicine pouch, and could skip along with incredible rapidity, as fast as a huntsman on a horse. Kamala and Amala were suckled by wolves in the Indian jungle in the 1920s, real-life Mowglis who ran on all fours. The famously enigmatic Kaspar Hauser, on the other hand, had been kept prisoner in a cellar for 16 years. He had been abused into his feral state, as had the author's most modern wild child, Genie, tied to a chair up to the age of 13, her only wilderness the bedroom of a house in a Los Angeles suburb.

What they had in common, then, was not so much an experience as a lack. They had all lived in extreme solitude through the period of early development when a child learns how to talk, how to eat, how to behave, how to find yourself in the mirror held up by the behaviour of other people.

They were wary, mute, ultimately withdrawn. None had language; all existed in a state delicately and impressively evoked by the author, in which the constant interchange between human beings that we take for granted had been mysteriously suspended, so that no, or very few, messages ever got through to spark a mood in sympathy with someone else.

They couldn't interpret themselves, and so they were interpreted, with alacrity. Unknowingly, they all became brief celebrities, as different times brought different resources and preoccupations to bear on their irresistible difference from ordinary human selfhood. In each case, the world's interest, the world's desire to know if "they" could be a mirror to "us", was channelled through a relationship with a mentor, someone who took on the role of protector, and combined an attempt to reclaim them for humanity with a burning curiosity.

The questions changed. Lord Monboddo, the Scottish philosopher, wanted to know if "Memmie le Blanc" represented a kind of intermediate stage between humans and animals, like an orang-utan. Dr Ital, the ambitious physician who cared for Victor, wanted to disprove Rousseau by showing that virtue began in sociability. Kaspar Hauser's early guardian, Professor Daumer, was an ardent mesmerist, who tested his charge's sensitivity to "brandy, loud noises, quiet noises, squeezed cheese, bright daylight, beer, cats, spiders, snakes, flowers and grape juice".

The stories these intellectuals generated about the feral children became their biographies, the only ones they would ever have, given their inaccessibility. Michael Newton is expert at teasing out the richly ambivalent implications of these accounts, noting the way, for example, that pity and a kind of envy, disgust or even delight compete for attention in them. Yet the keepers were kind too, and committed to helping the children get their human birthright of communication back. (It was usually too late: Victor learned to say the single word "milk", Genie learned vocabulary but not grammar, and made most use of her two stock phrases, "stopit" and "nomore".) Behind the theories, the author reminds us, lie hours and weeks and years in which each guardian patiently, patiently tried to reach through the child's silence; and behind that again stands the inscrutable experience of the silence for the child himself or herself. Victor liked to throw withered leaves onto still water. Peter enjoyed firelight. Michael Newton simultaneously does intellectual justice to the cases, and makes a space for the almost unimaginable version of humanity the wild children possessed.

This is more than enough. He really need not have worried about the people at parties who apparently said, when he told them what he was working on, "Well, what's the hook?"

? The Child That Books Built by Francis Spufford will be published in April.