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And Joey? Who knows what he sees. He doesn't know himself. Joey is driven by visions. He is the Crowboy.
''Crowboy'' is an immensely assured first novel. It's tense and atmospheric, blending reality and magic and creating an almost mythological feel in a future dystopian setting. Everything feels dislocated and timeless and Calcutt wastes very little time in exposition; it's all about the here and now for the children of these two gangs. And of course, the here and now is all very [[''Lord of the Flies]]''. Gang society is a devolved society running very much along the lines of winner takes all. Behavioural boundaries exist, but are naturally being pushed all the time by adolescents who have no external authority. The book uses this to ask the ultimate question about war - is it in us all? Is it an inevitable part of human nature, or is there another path?
''Crowboy'' has multiple narrators. This is a risky technique at the best of times, particularly when you're writing for children, and particularly when you're building tension - confused readers don't get tense; they just get more confused. But here it works wonderfully well. The book is asking many questions to which there are many answers. Life's big questions can't be answered by one point of view, we need to understand everyone's motivators before we can understand enough to develop our own opinion. ''Crowboy'' allows readers to test their own values against a variety of others and its competing narrators act to enhance its tension rather than diffuse it. Further adding to the sense of immediacy is a highly idiomatic style.
