B.R. Collins: The Traitor Game

is gathering speed as a word-of-blog “good thing” in YA circles: a book that is of delightfully middling length, without a threat of a sequel looming, with an intelligent story arc that deals with the emotional deathtraps and pitfalls that are the day-to-day punctuation of the life of mid-teens: what is cool and what is not, what can you trust to say or imply or understand, how do you act when under threat, physical or emotional? The Traitor Game plays to all these strengths with its two central motifs of the Judas Floor, an Indiana-Jones-style death-trap built for the amusing torture of captured rebels, and the Traitor Game itself, a chess-like figuration in which each side secretly inserts a ‘traitor’ peg inside one of their opponent’s pieces, to bring defeat and ruin from within at a moment of supposed victory.

If this all sounds medieval and intriguing, then you get your money’s worth in at least one half of the book, set in the imaginary land of Evgard, where a rebel youth Argent is held captive in the castle of his enemy, the Duke of Arcaster, and befriended by his son and daughter, Columen and Iaspis. Loyalty and fealty to new friends or old family turn and turn about, and the world of Evgard (mostly set around Norfolk and Suffolk, I imagined) is lightly but skilfully built by the author, with seriously clever ideas I could have read more about (the lead-light glass that delays the light that passes through it).

But the reader is not allowed to remain in Evgard, and neither is its inventor, fifteen yr old Michael, who has been building and dreaming, living and creating this world for years. This world is more than Angria and Gondal: it has maps, poems and letters and intimate histories, co-created and shared in by Michael’s best and only friend, the rather cool and doody Francis. Where Michael struggles to express himself and assert himself, Francis is as noble and self-assured as the Latin-speaking Columen of Arcaster; where Francis is decisive and sure, Michael falters and fails and fails again. The reasons for this are more than hinted at but extreme bullying comes near it, and the reader is taken uncomfortably over the terrible convolutions of male friendship and antagonism at the private RC school the boys attend.

The book reads easily – I read it at one sitting in a couple of hours this morning – and yet I can’t give it full marks. The interweaving of the two stories and their meaning to each other is superbly done: the brutal yet enlightened culture of the Arcaster regime is fascinating, in particular. The wordlessness of Michael and his inability or decision to simply not say or ask the right thing becomes more and more exasperating in the latter stages of the book: lots of dialogue trailing off with ellipses or interruptions “thus- ”.
Another thing I noticed – just the once dead obviously as illustrated below but it put me on the alert – was ‘over-explanation’. This is a book with heavy suggestions of male rape and a degree of beatings going on: not for 12 yr olds, I wouldn’t have thought. Michael is showing Francis his room and explains it’s nothing special.

Francis glanced back at him, and shrugged. “I’ve got very low standards. I have to share with my brother. Belmarsh would be nice, if I was the only person in it.” He grinned.
“I thought you were – ” Michael stopped himself. He turned aside, hoping Francis wouldn’t notice he’d said anything. That was what happened when you let yourself talk: you started saying things you shouldn’t.

No-one should need an explanation of what Michael is thinking here, or at least, it is fun imagining what he might be thinking. But the reader is told, of course.

I don’t want a book that is a complete mystery or with characters whose motivation is never made clear but it would be good to have some murkiness around and it was a shame that we never saw further use of the Judas Floor after its first appearance. That said, this book delivers a pretty good exploration of the crippling effects of playing the traitor game.