The books of Iain Brimswall’s Zoo Keeper trilogy take the socio-novel form. That is, a story is presented which unfolds through narration and the words of characters, in the normal way of fiction, but the platform is sociological. Somewhere between imagination and polemic a space is created in which the reader is invited both to enjoy the tale and to listen to the author’s social case. This space tends to be limited; making best use of it and achieving balance is the challenge of the socio-novel author. The Zoo Keeper trilogy plots not only the lives of three very different though closely associated characters, it also serves to trace the development of a writer tackling a difficult subgenre.

Completed by 2004, The Zoo Keeper follows mid-lifer and recent graduate Ellis Carmichael during a period of self-imposed social research. The question of why urban poverty continues to exist is pursued using a methodology called experiential observation, which in the story is effected by having the protagonist take up residence in a tower block on a neglected council estate located on the periphery of an unremarkable English city. This parallels the author’s own action, and the early part of the book is semi-autobiographical. The idea for The Zoo Keeper emerged out of material gathered in the later 1990s and intended for an academic study.

There is a palpable sense of frustration and sometimes anger in the text; quite possibly the writing of the novel was a way of managing these feelings. The central character discovers that a burgeoning industry has grown up around social deprivation. Urban community development becomes the prime target of this book. The observation that the country’s worst housing estates would appear to get no better despite the corps of development workers assigned to them leads Carmichael to the conclusion that poverty is cultivated and maintained in order to produce jobs for an under-occupied middle class.

A crucial second character is the ambitious Suzie Gardeen, younger by some ten years and with whom Carmichael starts a relationship. After a short period of training, she is soon the embodiment of community development as practised on the ground. When the affair fails, Carmichael accuses her of becoming zoo keeper both in name (she shortens to Su to sound more managerial – her family name originates from the French gardien, meaning keeper) and by occupation. Although the narrative supports Carmichael’s point of view, Gardeen is given her own feisty dialogue.

These two actors are seen to start off with genuine intentions of helping, from essentially opposite directions, to bring about some change within a distressed stratum of society. Both come to realise they are caught up in a system that will grind on remorselesly and completely unaffected by their personal imputs. Whereas Carmichael lets the situation get to him, Gardeen makes it work for her.

As a socio-novel, The Zoo Keeper works reasonably well. The storyline, laced with humour, holds the attention while the polemical load is given release in a chapter of questions and answers, after the fashion of a university seminar, played out in the protagonist’s unsettled mind. A little lumpiness of style here and there does not hamper the delivery of the message. The sketching of a character named Fee towards the story's end is a sign that more was to follow.

A second edition became available in 2008, an addition to the Urban Rim Publications list. Unusual for a novel, but reflecting the book's social complexion, a thematic index is included.

Missed Chapters, published three years to the day after The Zoo Keeper, demonstrates a calmer and more rounded writing style. While the previous novel saw itself essentially aimed at a facet of social organisation, this one operates at the personal level. Community development provides the backcloth for the telling of the story (to date) of Su Gardeen.

Mindful of the demands when a male writer attempts to relate female thought processes, especially over time, Brimswall constructed his protagonist as a mosaic, assembled from observations of real women. By design and by this means is portrayed on the page a personality not entirely at inner ease despite an outer show of spirited confidence.

A busy ‘real time’ storyline, with free-spending social-climbing Gardeen the imperious head of a regional agency, is put on hold at intervals to accommodate single chapters that describe progressively distant past episodes: Suzie the stifled suburban middle-class housewife; Suzie the teenage drop-out; Suzie the overshadowed child. The determinedly reinvented woman embarks on a search for self-understanding, though the reader can only guess where it might all be leading. Uncertainty may last until an apparent natural end to the story, where an insert announces one more chapter. Within that chapter, the above treatment is justified as Gardeen brings her own brand of closure to events that have troubled her.

There is generally a lightness of tone to the writing. However, it’s a socio-novel therefore some weighty themes are introduced. One such is early onset familial Alzheimer’s disease. A ‘physically indestructible, mentally crumbling’ Mum is looked after by sniffy elder sister Margo, but responsibility creeps Su’s way even while she frets about genetic implications.

Another social theme, threading through the book, is that of the paedophile condition, particularly the way the issue is dealt with and occasionally manipulated. The suggestion is that things are not always as clear cut as so readily assumed – there may be more going on. An example which serves as denouement for Missed Chapters is based on an actual case.

Also in the mix, a curious clutch of ideas mostly relating to race and religion is dispensed by the character of Craig Mains, a smug successful author. Further reference to religion is supplied by Fee Kemp-Davies, Su’s youthful sexual partner until the girl storms out of the relationship. Ellis Carmichael, ‘rescued’ at the very end of The Zoo Keeper by Su from the sink estate and here put in charge of all matters domestic, adds shared and private comment.

A revised cover and minor changes were applied February 2008.

The Shepherdess completes the Zoo Keeper trilogy of socially themed novels. Each instalment was written as a self-contained story, though the final book has more connectivity. This one is about Fiona Kemp-Davies, or Fee.

Miss Cade, a teaching aid at a bush missionary in Africa, narrowly avoids death from the sleeping sickness by being administered the ‘resurrection’ drug (eflornithine). The young woman is convinced the Lord has saved her for a purpose. On her almost penniless return to England, she reverts to Fee Kemp-Davies and turns up at the evangelical Church of the Message of God. Her status as faith-graduate of the fringe denomination, run from the elaborate rural residence of self-styled faith-principle Dominic Hope, gains her temporary harbour. When the search for employment comes to nothing, she makes a suggestion to extend the reach of the church into deprived estates of the nearby city, an idea which receives enthusiastic support from Dr Hope.

For a while, the project proceeds well. Fee’s sense of missionary purpose is so powerful that she contrives an affair with successful god-bashing author Craig Mains (met in Missed Chapters) with the intention of converting him. Things begin to fall apart – ultimately terminally – for Fee when the Church of the Message of God is subject to a dawn raid for illegal drugs.

Brimswall avoids the mundaneness of spelling out what’s happening by not regularly spelling out what’s happening. Instead, focus falls at first on religion, on Mains and the exchanges Fee has with him. Only later, within what is essentially a stretched coda to the novel and indeed the trilogy, is the theme of drugs aired, assisted by Su Gardeen’s piloting of a national drug awareness initiative. Community development brings to an end – as it started – the Zoo Keeper series, the final word fittingly coming from Ellis Carmichael.

By writing The Shepherdess, Iain Brimswall has considerably broadened an original horizon. While all the books of this trilogy possess sound structure each delivering a robust storyline, the author is seen progressively to improve at the socio-novel prerequisite of balancing story and message. Within this subgenre, an author’s gist may be candid in its assault (the practice of urban community development in The Zoo Keeper) or venturesome in subject matter (attitudes to paedophilia in Missed Chapters) or confrontational in tone (views on religion in The Shepherdess). To be precise, religious faith per se is not the target in the last story; it is the way that unquestioning faith allows wrongs to be perpetrated in its name.

Whatever the angle, if a social fiction writer’s remit is to entertain, to educate, to stimulate, then in The Shepherdess as throughout the Zoo Keeper trilogy, this is what Brimswall does.