Books: What the children get up to

A Game We Play by Simona Vinci Chatto pounds 1

Two months of vocal protest outside Nottingham Prison at the arrival of two notorious paedophiles recently piqued my interest into reading Nabokov's Lolita. There is something profoundly, rightly emotive about crimes committed against the vulnerability of children, and I suspect Humbert Humbert would have fared very poorly had his ardour for Lola's young body come to the protesters' attentions.

As with Lolita, Simona Vinci's A Game We Play has whipped up a storm of criticism in her native Italy. Mirko leads a small gang of children: Luca, his deputy and a year younger than him at 14, and Matteo, only 10. The girls invited along from the local family courtyard where they have all previously played under the more or less watchful eyes of a loose collective of mothers, are Greta and Martina, also both 10. The game itself takes place in a disused shed in fields blasted by the Italian summer sun where the five gather - nesting, almost - with a handful of their favourite things: a Gameboy, a tennis racquet, a radio.

Mirko, on the cusp of physical maturity, is still young enough to try to sustain the Peter Pan rubric of a group of kids "all in this together". As long as we don't start getting involved, nothing will ever have to change. But Mirko has fallen under the influence of two paedophiles. What should have been the entirely natural exploration of bodies between pubescents (which, as in Graham Swift's Waterland, can still have tragic consequences) is twisted by Mirko's introduction of pornography supplied by the paedophiles - eventually, with coercive demands for photographs.

The relationship between Mirko and his masters is held carefully in the background by Vinci's unweighted prose, which effectively places the moral burden on Mirko's young shoulders. We are not told how the paedophiles have gained Mirko's trust beyond reducing his former cocky attitude to them to one of complete submission. Mirko, however, has and is aware that he has the complete trust of his gang - a trust which he knows he will betray. Just like the urbane Humbert Humbert, Mirko is able to proceed with his game because he sets the rules and he has the total trust of his victim. The difference between them is innocence: Humbert knew his criminality, whereas Mirko, coerced by his faceless masters, is a part of the exploitative circle, still learning for himself, still incapable of making the judgement between what is exploration and what is horrifically beyond that; still, essentially, a child abused.

A Game We Play has been compared to the claustrophobic world of William Golding's Lord Of The Flies and, certainly, the intensity with which children learn and the cruelty which they can unthinkingly inflict upon each other is well documented by Vinci. Piggy, Golding's odd-one-out with his chubby, bespectacled appearance, was demonised with fatal consequences. When Mirko's exploration of Greta's body escalates to its violently disgusting conclusion, all, including Mirko, find they are trapped inside a game whose rules they no longer understand.

Blake's "Proverb of Hell", that you never know what is enough until you have known what is more than enough, is germane to the entire adolescent experience of acquiring knowledge. "There's no going back once you've seen it," Matteo glumly reflects. "You grow up. You learn things." And by then, of course, it is too late. Vinci's powerful novella is vital and hideously calm, which serves only to amplify her lament for the shiny pleasures of childhood twisted by adult hands into wreckage.