Anne Fine – The Tulip Touch
Posted by Alan Garner on June 19, 2010
Winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book Award (now the Costa Book Awards) in 1996, Anne Fine’s The Tulip Touch forms part of the oeuvre of her work for older children and teens. This is due in no small part to the more dark and challenging subject matter of this book, which explores childhood abuse and neglect, and at heart is a story about how we ignore the suffering of others for the sake of our own convenience.
The story’s narrator is the young Natalie Barnes, a girl of ten or eleven who is quiet, relatively studious and unimposing. Her family run hotels, and after moving into the Palace Hotel and moving schools once more, Natalie encounters Tulip Pierce, a strange, dishevelled and aggressive girl who lives nearby. In Tulip, Natalie senses excitement and danger; while in Natalie, Tulip senses a willing playmate for her cruel games. The two girls become best friends, and Natalie is drawn into Tulip’s increasingly bitter and mocking world. The novel turns on half-truths, glimpses and hearsay: we learn that Mr Pierce, Tulip’s father, is mean to her, that he makes her drown kittens and occasionally thrashes her. None of this is witnessed directly by the reader but is told through gossip and overheard conversations between people who heard it from other people. Tulip remains an enigma to us. While the adults around Natalie and Tulip (parents, teachers, guests at the Palace) seem to “understand” that Tulip “has had a difficult upbringing”, none of them are willing to truly take her on, preferring to get on with their own lives. Tulip becomes increasingly spiteful and cruel; and after a literally inflammatory evening, Natalie decides that she too has to start looking after herself and decides to “dump” Tulip as a friend. Thus the betrayal is set in motion and the scene is set for Tulip’s final revenge…
She tugged so hard at me, I had to go. But as I stumbled after her, still looking back, I knew I was bewitched. The Tulip Touch had really got me this time. I knew I’d dream of fires forever, and wake in the middle of my dull, dark nights to see the flames she might have lit in me still shooting up to scorch the sky. I’d see whole streets, entire cities, burning. I’d switch on my bedside light and, for a while, the old familiar pictures on the walls and clothes on the chair might blot out the smouldering visions. But I’d be sure Tulip was lying in wait in some bleak bedroom. And I’d know the minute my room was dark again, she’d pick up where she left off, and send more of her own imaginings into my boring dreams, to set them ablaze with her own growing frenzies.
The Tulip Touch is a smart and sad novel, bristling with danger and excitement. Aimed at children in their mid-teens, it deals with the cliques and (dis)loyalties of high school kids, with the carelessness of parents and the limits of our empathy for one another. It raises uncomfortable questions about all of us, about our apathy or complicity in social injustice, and – as the dark text on the novel’s sleeve reads – reminds us that no-one is born evil.
