The Radleys

The Radleys live in a village in Yorkshire. They are your typical middle class family, Peter is a doctor, Helen paints inoffensive watercolours, they have a son and a daughter, Rowan and Clara. Rowan feels like a freak at school and is subjected to daily bullying. Clara is quiet and has moved from vegetarian phase to full blown vegan. They have an uncle no one talks about and the kids don't even know he exists. To the outside world, they just seem a little odd but underneath they are harbouring a dark secret.

If you don't want to know what their secret is, stop reading now. You may also want to avoid other reviews and marketing bumpf as the synopsis provided by Canongate is pretty clear. I know some people might like working it out for themselves so I'm giving you fair warning...

They keep their curtains closed on summer days, the children are painfully pale and apply sunscreen before school each day and they are pro red meat. One thing that the Radleys don't do is drink blood, because whilst you may have guessed that they are vampires they abstain.

Before you click away thinking “Oh no, not another vampire book”, The Radleys is not some heady romance or action-packed fantasy yarn. No, these vampires live a fairly ordinary life. Matt Haig's prose is witty and entertaining. It's a tale about what happens when you try to be something you're not.

Writing a vampire novel in this day and age must be a daunting undertaking for any self-respecting artiste. No matter how dark, dirty, and violent you make your vampires, there's always going to be a comparison to Twilight. And if you want to recreate the image of vampires, casting them as near-regular people, rather than undead supernatural monsters, then you're basically begging to be lumped in with the other trash on the "Teen Paranormal Romance" shelf at Barnes and Noble. In his novel, The Radleys, Matt Haig manages to successfully overcome the teen paranormal romance temptation and craft a portrait of suburban vampires.

By casting his vampire family in the British countryside, Haig makes some choice alterations to the typical vampire myth elements. Vampires aren't vampires, they are blood addicts--living people who crave blood and gain power from it. Some of the common vampire ailments remain: blood addicts are weakened by sunlight and have allergic reactions to garlic, but they are not immortal. They can die of old age, but aging works at a much slower pace, allowing blood addicts to live for hundreds of years. The novel also presents an alternate history where all the great artists (Byron, Hendrix, Douglas Sirk) are blood addicts and the lesser talents (Sting, Phil Collins) are not. Also, when the blood addicts drink blood, they can fly. That part doesn't make a lot of sense. They don't change into bats or fog or anything like that, they just up and fly around, like characters from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It's very easy to view Haig's blood addicts as variations on Popeye: without their spinach (blood), they're weak and tired; with their spinach, they have the powers of superheroes. I realize that a novel where vampires are really Popeyes might seem a little ridiculous, but The Radleys manages to avoid being too outlandish. In fact, rather than describing it as a novel where vampires are really Popeyes, I should categorize The Radleys as a novel about middle-class suburban ennui, or middle-class suburban malaise, or middle-class suburban [insert pretentious foreign-sounding word here]. The Radleys isn't so much a typical vampire novel as it is a Jonathan Franzen novel, if Jonathan Franzen novels had vampires and weren't so insufferably awful.

The Radleys tells the story of a family struggling to find its identity. The parents, Peter and Helen, are abstaining blood addicts, using meat to feed their cravings and attempting to live as normal a life as possible. Their teenage children, Rowan and Clara, are completely unaware of their true nature, believing that they suffer from hereditary medical conditions that cause photo-sensitivity, insomnia, and migraine headaches. The family tries to lead a regular life, but the parents suffer from a largely loveless marriage and the children are outcasts at school. This sounds like the makings of a cliched tale of mid-life crises and teenagers learning to be cool by taking of their glasses and dressing like whores, but Haig's insertion of the vampire element makes The Radleys far more interesting than other stories of domestic depression.

Peter and Helen suffer from a loveless marriage because they cannont access the thing that brings them the most passion--blood. Rowan and Clara are seen as freaks because they are actually freaks, not because their dirtbag troglodyte classmates look down on quiet teens who like poetry. The vampirism in the story provides a source for the family's problems and, when Clara attacks and kills a teen who tries to take advantage of her (thus forcing her parents to come clean with the truth about their family), vampirism provides the impetus for the family to discover who they really are and finally function as a real family. Plus, there are super-evil, mind-controlling brothers, vampire-hunting secret police, and musing on fictional Booker prize shortlisted novels. You won't find that in any teen paranormal romance. (Well. you might find the first two.)

I won't give much more about the novel away, because I honestly think that The Radleys is a novel whose enjoyment hinges entirely on whether or not books about secret vampires living in a nice country home is something that appeals to you. The novel is much more than a run-of-the-mill vampire story, but a lot of the novel depends on the reader's willingness to accepts that there are a certain few who, by drinking blood, can fly around and carry corpses out to the North Sea. If that's your sort of thing, you'll probably like The Radleys. If it's not, I'd suggest you still give the book a chance. Haig does a wonderful job of pacing his novel with very short chapters. It makes the 350 pages of the novel read like a 137 page novella. There are some predictable twists in the story, and the ending is far too contrived, tying things up in a convenient (and not very Shakespearean-in-magnitude) package.