A town’s secret evil darkens the golden light of childhood

Even when he described a murder in a cemetery or a ruthless killer stalking two lost children, Mark Twain never lost his comic tone in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” All those fond memories of his Hannibal, Mo., youth bathed everything in a golden glow that not even these two undeniably terrifying moments could avoid. In looking back on those rites of initiation that mark young lives, some writers face a wave of nostalgia that tends to soften even the harshest subject matter.

Niccolo Ammaniti manages to avoid this pitfall even though in his third novel, “I’m Not Scared,” a golden childhood collides with a dark, murderous secret.

The book opens with an idyllic scene of childhood fit for Twain had he lived in Italy. It’s the summer of 1978 in the little village of Acqua Traverse, and only the children dare to venture out into the midday heat. Michele Amitrano is 9, a mischievous, healthy boy living in a land seemingly ideal for the young: With his gang of rowdy friends, he explores the landscape surrounding their village, the rolling wheat fields and woods, old houses and dried-up riverbeds.

And yet, for all the careless irresponsibility of being young, changes are taking place in Michele. Not hairs on his upper lip or a changing voice, but an interior ripening matched only, it seems, by the fields of wheat turning gold under the sun. In the midst of a footrace, he goes to the aid of his sister Maria, who’s fallen -- a gesture he’s never made before. When a girl named Barbara is ordered by the bully Skull to lift her dress as a penalty for finishing the race last, Michele objects. Not heroically, but as if some new idea is struggling to the surface of his character:

“I caught a glimpse of white knickers with little yellow flowers. ‘Wait! I came last,’ I heard my voice saying.

“Everyone turned.

“ ‘Yes,’ I gulped. ‘I want to do it.’

“ ‘No. She’s got to,’ Skull snapped at me. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. Shut up.’

“ ‘Yes it is. I came last. I’ve got to do it.’ ”

Angered by Michele’s sense of justice, Skull devises a difficult penalty for him: to walk through the first story of an old decrepit house, in a remote wooded area, that has sagging, dangerously unstable floors. Michele succeeds, however, and, at an open window, seeking to rejoin his friends, he leaps to a tree branch that snaps. He falls, landing on a leaf-strewn mattress. Underneath it is a hole:

“The hole was a couple of meters wide and two, two and a half meters deep.

“It was empty.

“No, there was something there.

“A heap of rolled-up rags?

“No.

“An animal? A dog? No.

“What was it?

“It was hairless.

“White.

“A leg.

“A leg!

“I jumped backwards and nearly tripped over.

“A leg?”

A young unconscious boy, the same age as Michele, is imprisoned there, with a shackle around his ankle. Despite the shock and horror, however, Michele doesn’t yell out to his mates. As every player of finders keepers knows, he explains, “the boy at the bottom of the hole was mine.”

We are relieved for his selfishness, though at the time it is maddening that Michele doesn’t tell his friends or even his parents. He is distracted, preoccupied by the things of a young child’s world -- hunger, anticipation of what toys his father, a poor salesman, brings home, love for his curvy, nurturing mama and for fairy tales and his fear of the goblins who wander the hills at night, looking for children to eat. The flame of Michele’s new morality seems to have flickered and gone out, but isn’t this how a young child might behave? It is one of the great benefits of Ammaniti’s storytelling that he doesn’t sentimentalize Michele nor demand bold gestures from a young child with a taste for fairy tales and a healthy imagination.

“Stop all this talk about monsters,” Michele’s father says at one point. “Monsters don’t exist. It’s men you should be afraid of, not monsters.”

Perhaps. But monsters and fairy tales contain kernels of truth. Take one of the lessons of Little Red Riding Hood: The greatest fear is to enter a safe place -- a grandma’s house, for instance -- and find the greatest evil waiting there, disguised. Late one night, when guests are at Michele’s house and he’s asleep, he hears a sudden commotion as the news comes on the TV:

” ... they all shouted at once: ‘Here it is! Here it is! Quiet! Quiet everybody!’

“Behind the newsreader was a picture of the boy. The newsreader went on: ‘The search goes on for little Filippo Carducci, son of the Lombard businessman Giovanni Carducci, who was kidnapped two months ago ...

“ ‘We are now broadcasting an appeal from Signora Luisa Carducci to the kidnappers, recorded this morning.’ ”

Then, Michele’s dear father reveals himself to be the wolf in this story: “Papa made the scissors sign with his fingers. ‘Two ears we’ll cut off. Two.’ ”

A whole host of motivations, many of them petty, are behind this awful, unbelievable conspiracy of townspeople: greed, bitterness at the world, the dissatisfactions of middle age. And Michele’s earlier moments of duty -- to his sister, to Barbara -- are eclipsed by the terrible decisions he must face. What can he do? When the plot unravels and he learns that the child must be disposed of, Michele rushes out into the night to face the goblins on the hill and to struggle with his loyalty to a parent when it contradicts a larger unspoken duty to a helpless human being.

Considered one of Italy’s best young novelists today, Ammaniti deftly handles an incredible plot twist that, in another’s hands, would amount to nothing more than a potboiler. “I’m Not Scared,” however, hardly fits that category though it borrows from the thriller genre for a story that is essentially about innocence lost and the dilemmas of youth. Childhood innocence, Ammaniti suggests, is nothing more than a gilded ignorance. And for some children, like Michele, this lesson takes a very cruel form, though thankfully he understands this lesson before it’s too late.

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