Rediscovered Books: Jane White's Quarry (1967)

I was fortunate to be pointed toward this 1967 novel by Anne Billson, who wrote the introduction to this new edition. It’s a wonderful example of the flexibility of the crime genre. White employs familiar tropes to unfamiliar ends, brings in the mythic and the folkloric without attracting attention to the fact, even drawing on that hoary lynchpin of adolescent brutality, Lord of the Flies, without allowing the weight of it to drag down her own singular skillset.

An outline of the story gives no idea of its impact. As Billson writes in the introduction, this story of a boy held prisoner in the titular space by a group of slightly older boys ‘is more like a quasi-pagan rite than social realist violence, without any of the sadistic abuse featured in later novels of youngsters committing acts of shocking violence’ apart from a couple of odd, almost tangential moments. Unlike the grim sporting violence in an exotic location like Golding’s novel, this story unfolds across the rolling suburban landscape in the midst of a heat wave. The languor sweats out of the boys like the damp from the cave in the quarry. The unsettling sounds rise from the earth, like the seismic shiftings of the 60s themselves, the brutal reality behind the ‘Swinging’ decade and the sickness of the 70s that lie ahead.

White manages to walk a careful line between slice-of-life matter-of-factness and a growing sense of inevitable dread. Even in brief moments of light-hearted respite the weight of something coming darkens the skies. Todd, the posh boy, Randy in name and nature, and Carter, the seemingly untroubled regular guy, alternate between mateyness, sudden hatred, and isolation. Naturally, they’re all terrified of making that step from schoolboys to adulthood. Even the cave itself mirrors this transitional stage in their lives, appearing without warning and yet almost as a response to the tensions they felt.

They had themselves passed and repassed it many times without realising its existence, until one day Todd, standing on the rock to rest, had casually moved on the rock face and had disappeared into the darkness, leaving the other two, appalled and terrified, to think that he had fallen through some hole or shaft to his death—until he had reappeared to them as they stood below, gazing silently up, and stood astride the narrow ledge of rock as if he had returned from the dead (109).

They choose their victim seemingly at random, but the boy’s uncanny air of self-possession constantly wrong-foots them. Who has done the choosing? Todd makes the initial decision at the start of the book, announcing ‘He’ll do.’ Yet almost at once they are unsettled, ‘he contrived to confuse them by his silence, his hidden face, his lack of resistance’ (15). The boy is not afraid, even when they threaten him and comes along quietly, almost defiantly. While subconsciously the three may want to kill off their own childhoods through this boy, their ambivalence creates a lot of the tension. Will they really take it that far?

They are less ambivalent when it comes to other targets. Perhaps the most disturbing scene comes when they all spot a girl playing at the bottom of the quarry and like a pack of jackals, pursue her up out of the quarry and into the path of some motorcyclists tearing up the paths around the quarry. ‘The girl let out a terrified scream which was faintly audible even above the infernal din of the two engines. She began to run, staggering in a crazy zigzag. The rider of the other machine has seen her and was waving frantically to her to come on, to go back—anything to get out of the path of the reading bucking thing which was pursuing her’ (164). Carter’s response, ‘Well, she won’t be able to tell on us now,’ seems accepted by the other two, though ‘Todd, who felt like a murderer, said nothing’ (165). Likewise, when they appropriate Todd’s mother’s car to head to the coast for a midnight swim, the boys eagerly destroy a breakwater with feverish haste for no apparent reason but the desire to tear down what others had built. While Carter and Randy view the ruin with satisfaction, Todd suffers an odd moment of crisis.

      Behind it, through the gap where it had stood, stretched the revealed length of peaceful beach, identical with the one upon which they stood. It is indistinguishable, thought Todd, looking bleakly at it, They had broken through to it by means of this superb act of destruction, and it was simply the same; no better, no worse. Somehow this distressed him greatly. His disappointment was irrational and acute (146).

​ The shift in their lives comes not from an eruption of unfettered violence, but from an embrace of the violence of the system in which they will live as adults. They don’t descend to the hidden cave in the quarry to rip the child apart like beasts. Instead they proceed in an orderly way to put him on trial, calling him as the Prisoner at the Bar, claiming he has had his twelve years to come up with a defence. ‘You mean I’m on trial for being here with you, like this?’ (237). Indeed, Todd speaks in his voice, accusing them all and claiming ‘We are your prisoners as much as you are ours’ (242).

This is an unsettling book that sidesteps easy answers, that lightly dips through confused adolescent male eroticism, confusion, anger and frustration without choosing one facet as ‘truth’ and conveying the uneasiness we all face when accused of crimes we may not remember committing.

Works Cited

White, Jane. Quarry. Boiler House Press, 2023.

[Thanks to Brad Bigelow at Boiler House Press for an advanced copy]

Available to buy from Boiler House Press here: https://www.boilerhouse.press/product-page/quarry-by-jane-white.