C.S. Lewis and other children’s writers may have deplored the lack of adventure in adult life, but it is grownup adventure that ruins the children in “Beasts of No Nation” (HarperCollins, 142 pages, $16.95), the first-person tale of an African child warrior. Uzodinma Iweala’s debut novel begins with Agu, a little boy who longs for domesticity and school, lying in the middle of a road, waiting for a band of rebels to kill him.

Instead, the rebels take him in. On his first raid, Agu is made to cut a man in the head again and again, until Agu gives in to frenzy. Afterward, Agu protests inwardly, but his protest is swept away on a current of nausea: “I am vomiting everywhere. I cannot be stopping myself. Commandant is saying it is like falling in love but I am not knowing what that is meaning.”

Mr. Iwaela, born in Washington, D.C., in 1982 and educated at Harvard, has constructed a radically passive character in Agu. His ceaseless present-perfect tense could be a function of the dialect of the unnamed African state in which he fights, but its convenience to Mr. Iweala’s purpose cannot be overlooked. It foregrounds sensation – “All the leaf is dripping with rainwater and shining like jewel or glass” – and reaps the psychotropic dividend of shock. It also makes Agu sound, sometimes, like a zombie. When he hears a command “that is just touching my body like a knife,” he doesn’t think. He flinches.

Mr. Iweala’s style risks cuteness. Like photographs of child soldiers that focus on the piquant inappropriateness of guns in little hands, his pidgin finds itself too playfully in possession of gore: “When I am looking up, I am seeing people hanging from tree like piece of meat. Head just hanging like coconut before it is falling off. Ah ah. Nah wah oh!”

Mr. Iweala’s genius for onomatopoeia does not help. Explosions go “GBWEM!” and a kind of panting laughter is “KEHI, KEHI, KEHI.” However illustrative the incongruity of Agu’s voice with his ghastly surroundings,the effect ultimately sounds artificial. Full of matter, and a strangely easy read,”Beasts of No Nation”exploits the authority of current events while teasing the question of the voice’s authenticity; the generic African nation in question may be the essentialized dream of the author.

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English writer Edward St. Aubyn made a splash here last year with the publication of his trilogy,”Some Hope,” about the maturation of Patrick Melrose, a troubled English youth who, in his churlish, man-against-society way, managed to find a decent way to grow up. Now, in “Mother’s Milk” (Open City Books, 256 pages, $23), we are introduced to his 5-year-old son, Robert.

In Robert, Mr. St. Aubyn has created one of the most unrealistically selfaware children in English literature. His powers of consciousness seem Mozartian in their precociousness. About his birth, Robert recalls understanding “that his mother had already been on the outside. … Now that he realized there was a difference between them, he loved his mother with a new sharpness.” When his little brother Thomas is born, Robert begins to miss his own infancy:

He felt that he could remember objects without names and names without objects pelting down on him all day long, but there was something he could only dimly sense: a world before the wild banality of childhood, before he had to be the first to rush out and spoil the snow, before he had even assembled himself into a viewer gazing at the white landscape through a bedroom window, when his mind had been level with the fields of silent crystal, still waiting for the dent of a fallen berry.

The fantastic nobility of a child who regrets his banality and imagines a dumb, object-like awareness is curiously believable, if only by dint of flattering the reader’s own fudged performances of nostalgia.

But “Mother’s Milk” loses some of its charm when Patrick takes over: He misses his wife, who has devoted herself to their children, but he reminds himself that he, unlike his children, has been “horror trained.” His propensity for bons mots keeps him below Robert’s sincere level; in the latter part of the novel, Patrick trails into alcoholism as the family tours the U.S., and the novel wraps itself in unfair critiques of our nation’s pizza and related hospitalities. But the rapid publishing of “Mother’s Milk” will do much to keep Mr. St. Aubyn in the American reading public’s mind, which he promises to occupy increasingly.

blytal@nysun.com