bookgazing | Slam - Nick Hornby

Sam is a young guy who likes to skate (on a skateboard not an ice rink in case you haven’t already guessed that from the title of this novel). He plans to go to college to do art and design. His mum, who failed her GCSEs because she was pregnant with Sam at the time, couldn’t be more proud. Then she introduces Sam to her friend’s daughter Alicia and the pair fall into the deepest kind of infatuation. They start sleeping together and although they’re careful, there’s this one time when they’re not and Sam doesn’t tell Alicia that something half happened that could change their lives. Their feelings for each other disappear, but it doesn’t matter because a few weeks later Alicia finds out she’s pregnant. Now Sam’s bright future seems to be disappearing.

Sam doesn’t know what to expect, but his skating hero Tony Hawke is going to help him out. Usefully Sam can talk to his poster of Tony Hawke and when Sam needs a push to embrace his responsibilities Tony Hawke whizzes him into the future so he can see what’s going to happen. It doesn’t always work out so well, in fact after the first trip into the future Sam runs away, but in the end it might just be the one thing that really helps.

Every time I think about Nick Hornby’s young adult novel 'Slam' I get angry. Sam and Alicia’s pregnancy comes about because of stupidity – there’s no nice way to sugarcoat it. Sam’s mum tries hard to make sure that her teenage pregnancy acts as a cautionary example about what can happen when you don't use protection. Both teenagers come from Britain where there are plenty of health clinics that offer free condoms. Both go to school and while the sex education they receive there is never discussed I’m assuming that because they both know about condoms and don’t come up with any of the crazy playground myths, like not getting pregnant while standing up, that they’ve both been taught the basics. There’s no kind of pressure that prevents them from using protection, they’re just stupid and Sam even admits that at the beginning of the book.

Hornby’s book seems to say that no matter how much sex education you give teens, no matter how much the generation before them talks about teenage pregnancy, no matter how easy you make it for them to get and use protection teenagers will still decide to have unprotected sex. Hornby feels this is a realistic description of the current situation in Britain and that depresses me. Maybe that’s because I kind of agree (I know I certainly put myself in one similar stupid position that could have ended in pregnancy even though I knew all about protection) maybe because I don’t agree at all (perhaps I’m naïve but I’ve always think the current generation of teenagers have a good grip of the full consequences of teenage pregnancy and that the majority of teenage pregnancies in Britain are down to poor sex education, not willful naïveté).

It’s hard to be sympathetic with the main characters, but it’s also hard to condemn them, unless you’ve never made a stupid mistake. So my attitude to the main characters was mostly ‘You seem like nice people but you’re also kind of dumb, try to raise your kid well.’ I felt like I’d pretty much written off the people I was reading about and was just crossing my fingers for the next generation. Judge not and all that jazz was a real struggle for me in relation to this book.

Now not much of what I’ve said above is to do with the actual book, it’s more about my personal response to the book because of who I am. There’s more of that stuff, for example I personally didn’t enjoy the way Hornby has Alicia describe abortion as murder and let’s that statement sit without having other characters challenge it in a meaningful way. I didn’t love being inside Sam’s head and listening to him talk about how all lads want a girl that looks like a model but with a bigger chest. Sometimes it’s a struggle for me to read a novel written in a male voice because I get the urge to slap them when they start talking about women.

However in the interests of objectivity I also have to say that Hornby’s writing is competent, funny and compassionate. Sam has a genuine voice and he thinks and talks like a real British, male teenager. I enjoyed his dedication to skating and it was touching to see how his hero worship of Tony Hawke filled the space his own father left in his life. I liked how Hornby kept the book British, rather than creating a blank landscape to avoid alienating readers from other countries (dodgy reasoning in my opinion). Hornby also thinks sensibly about what happens to teenage couples who get pregnant after they stop being a couple and the different forms their relationships can take. I think that because of all these elements ‘Slam’ would be a useful book to hand out to teenagers who find they are about to become dads and to teenagers you want to discourage from accidentally becoming dads. Sam is a character who teenage boys will be able to identify with and he’s a character they might take advice from.

If you have opinions, arguments, praise for the 24 hour pill advert currently airing on British tv… leave them in the comment section. If you’ve reviewed ‘Slam’ leave your link as a comment and I’ll add it at the bottom of my review.

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