the custard boys

The Custard Boys by John Rae (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1961)

A short, intense, and disturbing novel about a gang of adolescent boys in a northern seaside village in England during WWII.  It’s narrated by John Curlew, the most decent and brightest of the boys.  Excited by the war but feeling excluded from the action, the boys play at violent games that ultimately result  in the shooting death of Mark Stein, an Austrian Jewish boy who has escaped Nazism only to encounter and be destroyed by England’s more refined anti-semitism.  

Rae is a good writer, although there is perhaps too much dark foreshadowing in the book — it seems forced and strained and makes the book’s shocking conclusion less surprising and potent.