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Sonya
Hartnett
Surrender
Viking, $29.95hb, 245pp, 0 670 02871 1
IF
YOU ARE REGRETTING the passage of another
summer and feeling nostalgic about the
lost freedoms of youth, Sonya Hartnett’s
latest novel, Surrender, may serve as
a useful tonic. In Hartnett’s world,
children possess little and control less,
dependent as they are on adults and on
their own capacity to manipulate, or charm.
Hartnett characteristically writes about
lonely children in cruel or careless families,
in places that offer no relief. Perhaps
it is the conflict that Hartnett marks
out between children and adults that makes
the distinction between her children’s
and adult fiction hard to draw; for it
seems we can identify at any age with
a sense that the world belongs to someone
else. Besides, Hartnett’s novels
deal with terrors that last.
If
they ever cull the optimists, Hartnett
will survive. Her novels tell of abducted
children, alcoholism, incest, murder and
depression. She is probably best known
for her novel Of a Boy (2002), which won
the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and
The Age Book of the Year Award. She also
won the Guardian Children’s Fiction
Prize with Thursday’s Child (2000),
the story of an isolated family struggling
to survive the Depression. Surrender is
not as hauntingly sad as Of a Boy, and
it does not have the grittiness of Thursday’s
Child. Still, it may be her most curious
and compelling novel yet.
Surrender,
set in an isolated country town called
Mulyan, ‘ringed by shark-tooth mountains
... far, far away’, tells of the
town’s pariah family. The son, who
calls himself Gabriel, starts the story
on his deathbed: ‘I am dying: it’s
a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh
of a cello: dying. But the sound of it
is the only beautiful thing about it.’
In this way, Surrender starts where it
ends and spends its time circling around
one gruesome fact: Gabriel has found bones
in a shallow grave in the woods. As a
result, the whole forward movement of
the story is suspense, fearful curiosity
and delay.
Chapter
by chapter, Gabriel and Finnigan take
turns to tell the story. Finnigan is Gabriel’s
secret confederate and wild counterpart:
‘We were the same height and same
age and built along similar leggy lines,
but he was a hyena while I was a small,
ashy, alpine moth.’ If Gabriel is
the angel, then Finnigan is the ‘midnight
raider of kitchens, the sleeper-in-woolsheds,
the bareback horse-rider, the bather in
rushing streams. He is dirt under fingernails
...’. (If you’ve read Thursday’s
Child, Finnigan will make you think of
Tin, the tunnelling boy, the uncontrollable
creature of earth.)
Early
on, we learn that Gabriel and Finnigan
have made a pact: ‘I’ll do the
bad things for you,’ says Finnigan.
‘Then you won’t have to. You
can just do good things.’ This is
a pact that enables Gabriel to survive
his repressive parents: his vigilant,
reclusive, religious mother and his father,
‘simply a frightening man’.
It helps Gabriel to endure his loneliness
at school, and his guilt about the death
of his younger brother. Thus he retains
his sense of innocence and still gets
what he wants, at least for a time.
Gabriel
and Finnigan’s pact also allows Hartnett
to enact that enduring theme in Gothic
literature: the desperate closeness, the
fascinated interdependence, of what you
might call good and evil. Surrender is
a novel where the characters also work
as symbols — even the dog that Gabriel
shares with Finnigan is called Surrender
— and the plot is about as close
to allegory as a murder mystery can be.
Hartnett
specialises in isolated characters and
places, but Surrender seems more intensely
claustrophobic than her other novels.
With Gabriel and Finnigan telling the
story, it becomes difficult to work out
how much of what they say is an elaboration
of madness or deceit. As Gabriel warns,
‘I am Gabriel, the messenger, the
teller of astonishing truths. Now I am
dying, my temperature soaring, my hands
and memory tremoring: perhaps I should
not be held accountable for everything
I say.’
In
this way, Surrender resembles Robert Cormier’s
astounding 1981 novel, I Am the Cheese
— not surprisingly, perhaps, for
Hartnett and Cormier corresponded for
some years before he died. In I Am the
Cheese, as in Surrender, the force moving
the story forward is the narrator’s
memory taking us back; and, possibly,
taking us in. The narrator plays this
cat-and-mouse game with the reader, and
the less certain we are of him, the more
closely we identify with his uncertainty
about what he can believe and trust. Both
novels draw the reader into a disturbed
and heightened imaginative world: what
they lose of reality they make up in intensity.
With
all the secrets and uncertainty in Surrender,
Hartnett has found a situation that suits
her style. Above all, she is good at creating
an atmosphere; so, though many terrifying
things happen in Surrender, the atmosphere
remains much stronger than the plot. Of
course, this is one effect of creating
protagonists who are, or feel, powerless;
who do not so much take the story forward
as watch the world close in. But it is
also an effect of Hartnett’s writing
style.
She
has mastered the short, intense sentence,
so her novels are evocative and also fast-moving.
In Surrender, for instance, she uses disturbing
metaphors and analogies — ‘The
digging tools they’re using are silver
as werewolf bullets. The colours scream
so loud at me that I clap my hands to
my ears’ — until the entire
world of the novel seems precarious and
sinister. As Hartnett once remarked, ‘I’m
not so much a storyteller as ... a troublemaker’.
And Surrender is trouble: weird, darkly
compelling — and finally discomfiting,
as it intends to be.
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