A talking rabbit called God and a tiger who takes a human wife both feature in this month’s collection of debuts. The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (Orion), is narrated by Natalia, a young doctor who is touring orphanages during the aftermath of a recent Balkan war. Her job, as she puts it, is to “sanitise children orphaned by our own soldiers” in places where deep, often unspoken tensions linger over simple questions like how to spell your surname; clues which might reveal whose side of the conflict you were on. When she receives news of her beloved grandfather’s death in mysterious circumstances, she becomes determined to find out why he died; or, more precisely, what he was searching for when he passed away.
Piecing together fragments of the stories he told her when she was a child, she realises that he may have been trying to find the “deathless man” he once mentioned: a vagrant who seemed to be immortal. And all of this appears somehow connected to a tiger who escaped from a zoo in 1941 and came to live in Galina, her grandfather’s village, as well as the silent woman who became known as the “tiger’s wife” when the animal started his nocturnal visits to the village. As a young boy, her grandfather became fascinated by the tiger: both he and the tiger’s wife seemed to share the understanding that, unlike the cruel, predatory tigers of adventures like The Jungle Book, this one was “concrete, lonely, different.”
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As the narrator herself admits, “many of the people telling you the story can’t have been alive when it happened, and then it becomes clear that they have all been telling each other different stories, too”.
Obreht threads together echoes of community gossip and folklore, vividly evoking the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small village, and the feelings of fear and hope that become heightened at times of war. This is a tale of many layers: interspersed between the episodic story of the tiger, and Natalia’s own quest to find her grandfather’s “deathless man,” are Natalia’s memories of teenage life during the heavy, pregnant pause before the war of the 1990s hit her city, and life after the bombs started falling. It is a poignant, seductive novel, its range all the more impressive given that English is not Yugoslav-born Obreht’s first language. And it has been longlisted for the Orange prize.
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Moving on to talking rabbits, and the first act of When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman (Headline), is equally captivating. It is the story of Ellie, a girl growing up in 1970s Essex who has decided to call her pet rabbit God. On the brink of adolescence, she observes the world with both a childish sense of wonder and the unflinching, no-nonsense perspective of a young person. The second act, in which she is an adult, is less intriguing simply because it is necessarily more grown up – even though Ellie herself is resistant to behaving like one – and when events like 9/11 come into focus, even though they are handled in a refreshingly unpredictable way, the terrain begins to feel much more familiar. That said, the characters’ personal stories; those of Ellie’s brother, his friend Charlie, and her correspondence with her long-lost childhood playmate, Jenny Penny, are compelling throughout; rendered with an appealing frankness, precision and emotional acuity.
Both of these writers use elements of myth and magic to give shape to private worlds. There is nothing supernatural, by contrast, about David Miller’s Today (Atlantic), though it shares some of the claustrophobia of the first, and the psychological subtlety of the second.
The central event is the death of the writer Joseph Conrad at his country home just outside Canterbury in August 1924. His family and friends have assembled to celebrate his birthday when he suddenly falls ill and passes away. Through the impact of this on all of those around him, observed largely by an outsider, Lillian Hallowes, Conrad’s secretary, Miller (who by day is an influential literary agent) paints a rich, often comic portrait of a family coming to terms with grief and loss – and of the passions, jealousies and scheming that colour their relationships. Although hamstrung at first by an impossibly large cast of characters (Miller provides a lengthy dramatis personae at the beginning), once it gets going it is both a moving and surprisingly funny caricature of a quintessentially English family.
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHEN
