Seven Years of Darkness is a fitting title for this murky and claustrophobic Korean thriller written by You-Jeong Jeong in 2015. The Prologue tells usSeven Years of Darkness is a fitting title for this murky and claustrophobic Korean thriller written by You-Jeong Jeong in 2015. The Prologue tells us:
“People would refer to that night’s events as the Seryong Lake Disaster. They would call Dad a crazed murderer. The story was so big that I, too, became famous, as his son. I was eleven years old.”
For seven years, Choi Sowon, now a lonely teenager, has lived in the shadow of his father’s shocking crime. For all that time he has been ostracised because his father, Choi Hyonsu is in prison for mass murder. Hyonsu used to be a professional baseball player, but after an injury he had taken to drink. Nevertheless the murder was inexplicable; a seemingly insane act which led to many deaths. Hyonsu was charged with not only (view spoiler)[ killing the young daughter of a neighbour, and also the girl’s father, throwing his own wife (Sowon’s mother) into the river and destroying most of a nearby village - including drowning four police officers - by opening the floodgates of the dam where he was head of security. (hide spoiler)] We learn all this very near the beginning of the novel.
But not all is at it seems. This is a dark and disturbing novel, which is full of twists and turns.
The setting is the Seryong reservoir, Hansoldung and the small area surrounding it, on the other side of Peryong mountain from the town of Sunchon, in the Chungchong province. Those responsible for maintaining the reservoir and arboretum do not mix with the small community of about a dozen people who live nearby, and Sowon has no friends from either group. For the last seven years he has been passed from relative to relative. Everyone tries to make someone else take responsibility for the boy, as his father Hyonsu’s case weaves its way through the courts. At first Sowon thinks he can make a new start in his new home, but he is pursued by an anonymous sender of newspaper articles. The whispers start so that yet again everyone soon knows about his father’s crimes.
Now the final day of execution is nearing, and Ahn Sungwhan (Sowon’s guardian whom he calls Mr Ahn) disappears. Shortly after, Sowon receives a package (view spoiler)[ containing a manuscript penned by Ahn Sungwhan, who had been attempting to make a living as a writer. It purports to tell the true story of what happened at Seryong Lake. (hide spoiler)] Much of the novel is told this way through flashback, to enable us to piece together and make sense of what happened, and to give us the perspective of most of the people involved. As more facts and suppositions are revealed, we also see that being socially ostracised is the least of Sowon’s worries; he is actually in a great deal of danger.
Through the manuscript we learn the back story. Ahn Sungwhan, a diver, was working as a security guard at Seryong Lake, a ‘first-tier’ reservoir located in the remote Hansoldung village. Dr. Oh Yongje, a dentist owned the arboretum on the reservoir; and Sowon’s father, Choi Hyonsu had just been hired as the new head of security at Seryong Dam (making him Sungwhan’s boss).
Seven Years of Darkness concentrates on these three men, as their inner thoughts build resentments and bristling relationships between them. Two of these men are unsympathetic characters, controlled by their anger and brutish, or drunken behaviour. The third becomes a loyal and supportive friend to one of them, although no reason is given for this. Finding anyone to identify with in Seven Years of Darkness is mostly a lost cause, but this character is perhaps one we can feel empathy for. Each of the three men has something to hide about the night of the reservoir disaster. They are all trapped in an elaborate game of cat and mouse, as each tries to uncover what really happened, without revealing their own closely guarded secrets.
The females are very much secondary characters. Most prominent are the wives of Hyonsu and Yongje; the aspirational and upwardly mobile Eunju, and Hayong the cowed and bullied wife of the dentist. Each is ruled by their emotions, and lives their life as an adjunct to the males; an aspect I have noticed before in Korean literature. We see their frustrations and fears, and how this impacts on the events. There are two children of similar ages: Sowon and Yongje’s daughter Seryong. I would have liked to see more about their interactions, but they are objectified casualties, and very much secondary to the mind-games between the adults.
There is terrorising, domestic violence - some of which is vicious and graphic - and a brief episode of animal cruelty as well as ongoing child abuse (i.e. bullying and brutality, not sexual). There is little let up from this, until one night when things come to a head.
The plot is a finely worked web, with the devious spider at the centre signalled very early. We watch how the villain crafts and sets the threads carefully in place so that the designated victims are ensnared. The machinations of the plot are all told through the manuscript, so that we learn of this alongside Sowon, who is trying to fit all the pieces together. Personally I think the novel would have benefitted from exploring Sowon’s perspective rather than simply retelling these past events. I have no sense of how Sowon feels about his predicament. I also feel that the ending was rather rushed. I would have liked more to have been made of the relationship between past and present.
The novel is translated into American English by Chi-Young Kim. It is quite a careful translation, with only an occasional lapse of tense or parts of speech (“shined his torch” irked me a few times, too). For those not familiar with name order in South-East Asian names where the surname is at the beginning, the text often helpfully says something like “Dr Ahn” for Ahn Sungwhan, which serves as a reminder. (Incidentally, as you can see, the translator has chosen to switch her name Kim Chi-young (김지영) round, and arrange it using the conventional Western name order.) As another aside, at the end I was surprised to discover that You-Jeong Jeong is a female author. I always maintain that if I can tell the gender of an author, this often acts as a indicator that I will not enjoy the book. I deliberately do not read blurbs immediately before, either, so knew nothing about this one before I began. Yet all the way through, I was conscious of an erroneous feeling that this was a male author.
Am I glad I read Seven Years of Darkness? Not really. My experience of Korean literature is limited; I have only read one other book so far by a South Korean author, an eco-thriller which I much preferred. In places it reminded me of American hard-boiled crime thrillers; a genre I do not care for. However there were a few beautiful passages which hinted at an aspect I would have liked to see developed, such as this flash of memory at a critical moment for Hyonsu:
“sorghum fields swaying bloodred under the moon, the ocean breeze wafting over the stalks, the glimmer of the lighthouse beyond the mountain at the far edge of the field. A boy walking through the fields, clutching his father’s shoes and a flashlight.”
Seven Years in Darkness is very atmospheric in places, such as the description of a night dive through the underwater “drowned” village. There are places where there is a feeling of unreality about the whole thing:
“the recurring dream he’d had every night for the last three nights was not a dream; it was reality within a dream and a dream within reality.”
There is a sense all through of lost dreams, of thwarted ambitions and momentary decisions which drastically affect and wreck everything which happens afterwards. Although the plot is ostensibly about revealing the truth, we are left in no doubt that this can sometimes be a grey area. You-Jeong Jeong said that this is the core of Seven Years of Darkness:
“Fate sometimes sends your life a sweet breeze and warm sunlight, while at other times a gust of misfortune. Sometimes we make the wrong decisions. There is a gray area between fact and truth, which isn’t often talked about. Though uncomfortable and confusing, none of us can escape the gray. This novel is about that gray area, about a man who made a single mistake that ruined his life. It’s about the darkness within people, and the lightness made possible by sacrificing oneself for someone else. I am hopeful that we can say yes to life in spite of it all.”
For me though, in the end Seven Years in Darkness is about power, and not about “truth”.
Friedrich Nietzsche maintained that there is no such thing as absolute truth: that there is no eternal and unchanging truth.
“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
We certainly see here that people impose their metaphorical truth on others in the pursuit of power. A strong sense of this comes through to me, rather than You-Jeong Jeong’s idea of light through self-sacrifice. I was rooting for a different ending throughout this book, although that could possibly be my cultural expectation. In some ways Seven Years of Darkness does not conform to the Western prototype for thrillers. As “Crime Time” said:
“this powerful tale of family violence, the abuse of drink and the sins of the fathers proves fascinating as it explores a way of life so different from our own and makes powerful statements about South Korean society and mores”.
The “Financial Times” calls it “an admirably tough fable about the fragile search for the truth.”
The “Los Angeles Times” calls You-Jeong Jeong a “certified international phenomenon … one among the best at writing psychological suspense”.
Germany’s “Die Zeit” has said You-Jeong Jeong is “rightly compared to Stephen King”, and named Seven Years of Darkness as one of the top ten crime novels of 2015.
You-Jeong Jeong is hugely popular in South Korea: the “Queen of Crime” who has written four best-selling psychological suspense thrillers. The author’s work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Thai and Vietnamese. It remains at my default of 3 stars, but depending on your taste, you may well think that Seven Years of Darkness is a gripping read....more
It’s not clear how or where that phrase originated, but what is clear is that it is a misnomer. It is usually used by officials “Nothing to See Here!”
It’s not clear how or where that phrase originated, but what is clear is that it is a misnomer. It is usually used by officials such as the police, as a way of moving people on; of dismissing or downplaying potentially dangerous situations. Used in fact when there very evidently is a great deal to see!
So what can be happening on the cover of this book? It looks as if a child has burst into flames. But … Forget the “but”s. That is precisely what the book is about.
Nothing to See Here is the title of a novel by the American author Kevin Wilson, who writes stories about families and about spontaneously combusting children. “I’ve kind of cornered the market” he joked in an interview, “but then it is quite a small genre.”
For most of us this seems an odd sort of obsession, but for Kevin Wilson it is intensely personal. When he was a child, Kevin Wilson read a book of “Out of the Unknown” stories, based on the television programme. One chapter in particular—the one on spontaneous human combustion—fascinated him so much that he read it over and over again. In a strange way, he found that he identified with the chapter.
Kevin Wilson had powerful feelings inside him which he did not understand, and nobody else seemed to have. When he was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome, that seemed to explain it. After that he kept expecting to suddenly burst into flames, and as a teenager he wished it would actually happen, to keep people away.
“I’ve always had this kind of agitation and looping thoughts and small tics,” he says. “Falling off of tall buildings, getting stabbed, catching on fire—they were these just quick, kind of violent bursts in my head …
I was an anxious kid, and I had all this agitation inside of me, and so it made sense that I just assumed I might burst into flames. It seemed entirely possible. And then as I got older and became a teenager and my anxiety became more understandable, I kind of wanted to burst into flames, like that would burn out all the anxiety inside of me and I’d be kind of clean.”
This impulse to burst into flames would not leave him alone. He did not want to harm anyone else, but the quick, intrusive thoughts had images conjured up from his own anxiety, which left him feeling terrified. Over the years the “loop” just kept repeating in his head, until Kevin Wilson decided he simply had to write about it. He wrote one story partly about spontaneous combustion, which he called “dark and fabulous” and another which was more melancholy. Kevin Wilson thinks they both have a lot of heart, and since both deal with combusting children and young adults, Nothing to See Here is a sort of natural trajectory; in part a combination of these two earlier stories. In fact it is his third novel and fifth book, written in 2019. He has found that writing about it helps to control the images and feelings in his head.
Kevin Wilson is also fascinated by the various relationships between parents and children:
“Knowing children—I have two little boys—and I think children when they have tantrums or even when they’re agitated they look like they’re going to combust. It’s entirely possible to me that my boys might burst into flames.”
Taken as a straightforward story, Nothing to See Here is about a 28-year-old woman who takes over the care of twin children who burst into flames when they are afraid or angry. She does this even though her own life has been a disaster so far. She does not feel she is worth anything, so how can she possibly protect anything? This is what interests the author. He freely admits that he finds the idea touching.
We all hope and believe that in our society the strong will protect the weak, but Kevin Wilson points out the ugly fact that this is often not so. In real life people will protect their own interests. They will protect the weak if it serves their own interests, or just if they feel like it, but generally they don’t care. However a family unit operates differently. In a family the weak ones strive to protect those who are even weaker, by finding something inside themselves. Somehow, they develop the strength to protect the ones who need it most.
Enter our protagonist and narrator Lillian Breaker, who has not had much of a family life so far. A clever girl, she was sure she could escape from her mother’s apathy and indifference to her, and her abilities won her a scholarship to “Iron Mountain”, an elite boarding school for privileged children. Lillian tells us how the very first day there she met Madison, who was her polar opposite. Madison was everything Lillian was not: rich, beautiful and popular. Everything just seemed to fall into Madison’s lap. These two were assigned as roommates, and unlikely as it seemed, they became firm friends.
Lillian loved the school, but somehow knew that it could not last and her life would go wrong. It always did. Sure enough there was a life-changing episode she could do nothing about, (view spoiler)[ which forced her to leave the school. Madison had been smoking dope, but her wealthy and influential father persuaded Lillian’s mother—with a hefty bribe—to tell her daughter to accept the blame. After all, he argued, it couldn’t make any difference to Lillian’s future life, could it? Madison however was destined for great things, and could not afford to have any scandal attached to her. Lillian’s mother could not resist having more money to gamble with, and so Lillian was forced to be shamed, and accept the blame. She knew that nobody had ever really expected any better of her, and she was expelled. Over the next fifteen years the two friends drifted apart, as they inhabited different worlds, but they always stayed in touch by letter. (hide spoiler)]
This is how, at the beginning of the novel we find Lillian dispirited and without hope, still living in the dismal and cluttered attic of her mother’s house and working at a series of dead-end jobs.
“A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.”
Madison on the other hand (view spoiler)[ has made a successful marriage to a promising young diplomat. Out of the blue, she sends a letter inviting Lillian to come and stay with her in her enormous mansion in Tennessee. When Lillian gets there Madison pleads for her help. She needs someone—a governess or nanny—to take care of her husband’s ten year old twins, from an earlier marriage. Bafflingly, she thinks Lillian, who has no experience of or wish to work with children, is the perfect person for the job. (hide spoiler)]
The couple believe that their extreme wealth can buy a solution for any problem. Madison is a supreme manipulator, although she seems so personable, and the story from now on is an engaging one. (view spoiler)[ On Lillian’s first meeting with the twins, Bessie bites her hand with some force, inflicting a deep wound. But Lillian is determined to make a success of this job and form a relationship with the twins. She sees that they do spontaneously combust whenever they get angry or scared. Flames flicker and ignite from their skin in startling yet beautiful ways.
As the three become closer Lillian learns that they can even make it happen. They can make themselves warm, and their skin gets red and ripples of flame run up and down, but they do not get burned themselves. However, although their fire does not harm them, it can burn the people and things around them. They leave panic and destruction in their wake, and have to live in a special, secluded house, away from others. Lillian works out ways of lessening it all, while trying to give the twins love, which they have never known, fun, a basic education and a sense of purpose. She is aided up to a point by Carl, a bodyguard and Mary, the cook who are both servants and instructed to help her (hide spoiler)]. Both of these secondary characters are beautifully drawn; it is a treat to read the scenes they are in. We are very aware as we read though, that what Lillian is trying to nurture are the aspects which she herself has never known.
“You took care of people by not letting them know how badly you wanted your life to be different.”
Madison and her husband Jasper Roberts are immensely aspirational, and desperate to hide anything which will not fit the image they seek to project. The twins’ father is an all-purpose Senator, a clone of all the other grey-suited politicians, spouting meaningless platitudes which he hopes will take him to the top:
“Of course, we saw in the newspaper, front page, how Jasper had been nominated, and everyone said this was a savvy decision on the part of the president. Everyone seemed to love Jasper, and perhaps it’s because I didn’t like him, but it seemed like what they loved about him was that he was inoffensive and gentlemanly, that he looked like he knew what he was doing. Good for him, I guess. If you were rich, and you were a dude, it really felt like if you just followed a certain number of steps, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted.”
(view spoiler)[Indeed he does become the Secretary of State. (hide spoiler)] All along he is desperate to hide these fire children and ashamed of having any true emotions. We wonder how this novel can possibly end. Everything rests with Lillian:
“And, then, like a second bolt of lightning, it struck me with dead certainty what would happen if the children disappeared, if they died, if they simply inconvenienced everyone around us. I would be blamed. And I would be sent back home. And just like all those years ago, when I’d been kicked out of Iron Mountain, everyone would sit there blaming me, wondering why I thought I was anything other than what I was.”
The whole novel is entertaining, but there is a point near the end which made me laugh with delight. (view spoiler)[ The Roberts are projecting the perfect family on television, when Jasper is being confirmed as Secretary of State. The twins and Lillian are not involved, of course, but Madison is holding their own young son, Timothy, on her lap. He is a reclusive, spoilt child, but seemingly “normal”—until he dramatically bursts into flames in front of millions of viewers. (hide spoiler)] It is a perfect moment, with no forewarning.
We enjoy the story, seeing the positive message, and completely believing that yes, children can burst into flames. I had assumed it was a metaphor, and had in my mind John Wesley’s saying,
“Pray up until you catch on fire, and people will come to watch you burn … I get alone with God in prayer. He sets me on fire. The people come out to watch me burn.”
Nothing to See Here though is a very different scenario. Lillian is certainly no John Wesley! She is loudmouthed, her language sprinkled with adjectival curses. This is her vernacular; she does not care what others think, and it is part of her personality. But she is the person we root for; the one person who will make everything right if she possibly can. She even hangs in there when Bessie literally bites the hand that feeds her … surely an in-joke? And surely this hilarious, dead-pan novel is a metaphor, and not just for angry or emotional kids, who seem about to burst into flames with their pent-up energy or frustration?
I read it as more than that. For me, this is a savage indictment of the whole “American dream”. Here we have the powerful rich who buy and squirm their way into political positions.
“There are a lot of nice things about being rich, but one of the best is that you can say almost anything, and if you do it with confidence, without blinking, people put a lot of effort into believing you.”
Here we have those with a privileged lifestyle, who have few principles and no honour, and who are so ashamed of anything that does not fit in—those they should care for—that those children grow up unloved, and having no sense of self-worth. As Kevin Wilson said in an interview:
“Children are always perfect. They didn’t ask to be brought into the world, so as soon as they are born the parents are the bad guys. Whatever goes wrong it is their fault, and they have to figure it out.”
We see examples of a cultural underclass too. Lillian felt it was almost inevitable that something would prevent her from becoming educated, despite her innate intelligence. And given the status quo, we could have predicted the iniquitous sort of thing it would be.
If you had told me I would enjoy reading about various sorts of dysfunctional families, I would never have believed you. But this quirky, bizarre novel set over just one summer, is droll, full of heart and most entertaining, with plenty of messages should you want them. Terry Pratchett once said:
“Magical realism is just fantasy with a collar and tie”
and I know what he means. This story is magical realism, but it has no literary pretensions whatsoever. It is straightforward, simply told—and a lot of fun to read.
“They stood there, burning. And I was happy. I knew they were okay. I knew that they couldn’t be hurt. The grass turned black at their feet, and the air around them turned shimmery. It was beautiful. They were beautiful.”
“They didn’t want to set the world on fire. They just wanted to be less alone in it.”
“Let’s just keep going, super cool,” I said. “Nothing to see here.”...more
When I was little I lay awake, scared of the dark.
Spooky things were out to get me, and I knew who conjured them up. Witches! But witches weren’t realWhen I was little I lay awake, scared of the dark.
Spooky things were out to get me, and I knew who conjured them up. Witches! But witches weren’t real … my parents had told me so. Yet I could see them in my imagination. How could I conjure something like that out of nothing? If I could see them in my mind’s eye, then they must be real. I lay there petrified, quietly sobbing to myself, lest the witches hear me.
Eventually my mother gently opened the door. “Is it a nightmare?” she asked, and I tried to explain. Somehow it was difficult. “Are witches real?” No. But … and eventually I expressed what I thought she was bound to laugh at.
“Can I make them real just by thinking about it?”
“No”. It was said seriously but said too quickly. Full of worry we talked some more, and then my father came in. A questioning look from my mother. “Shall we ask him?” A pause. “Yes,” I said in a small, scared voice.
To his credit my father did not answer straight away. He thought for a long time and then said “I don’t think so, no.”
“But are you sure?” “Yes, I don’t think you can make something become real just by thinking about it.”
I’m not sure I believed him, but I did get to sleep that night.
Even now it is a powerful feeling, that we can conjure up something terrifyingly evil, immense and unstoppable, just by believing it it. The relationship between superstition and horror is somehow built into all our psyches, popping out nastily when we least expect it.
It’s a great premise for a book, and the Irish author A.M. Shine bought into it with The Creeper.
I was intrigued by the Prologue:
“Fiona knew before hearing the operator’s voice that she was beyond saving. There was nowhere she could hide that it wouldn’t find her.”
Ah yes, I remembered, this is an Irish author, very probably inspired by folklore, history and mythology. The use of “it” stood out; folk horror then, although I knew that the author was known for writing “gothic horror”. His debut novel “The Watchers” in 2021 was critically acclaimed, and has been made into a film. Plus this one, written the next year, had been chosen as a monthly read in a group I’m a member of.
“It’s at the window. It’s smiling at me”
That was enough. I bought it on kindle … and from then on the wretched book went rapidly downhill, so that by the end I was heartily sick of it.
We learn straightaway that Fiona Quinn is (view spoiler)[doomed (hide spoiler)] with the entrance of a detective Eamon Barry, although this is inserted as a general teaser, and the main action in the novel swiftly swerves away.
It’s always a bad sign when we are so conscious of the actual writing. By chapter 4 I was distracted from what was happening by the amateurish writing, and getting fed up with all the similes. Everything seemed to be “like” something else; the author used the word “like” 534 times in this average-length book. Admittedly sometimes this might be use of the verb “to like”, but equally this does not count similes which use “as” or “than”. It really feels as if the author is practising a creative writing exercise. I expect better.
The novel also did not seem to have been very well proofread. There were quite a few typos, for example “too” instead of “two” in “her legs are too different lengths”… and at one point it did not make sense that one person said something when it was clearly said by another. I don’t expect every book I read to become an instant classic, but I do expect at least competent writing.
Yet I remained curious; a sucker for a story. Everything was in place now to tell a good yarn. We are introduced to Ben French, an historian with a knack for charming stories out of the elderly (and who inexplicably works with an outmoded cassette tape recorder! Surely anyone who has ever experienced mangled tapes and jammed heads would agree that there are more reliable methods, especially for recording essential interviews in out of the way places.) Ben has been unable to get a job commensurate with his qualifications since university. He feels as though he is letting everyone down: both his parents and his child (the result of a one-night stand). Then he receives a “project proposal” from an stranger.
Soon after we meet Chloe Coogan, a pert and pretty (of course!) archaeologist at the start of her career. Her field is the archaeology of indigenous communities in the nineteenth century. They have each been handpicked by a mysterious academic, Dr. Alec Spalding, who stresses that they are “perfect candidates” for his task, for which they will be paid handsomely. Greed (and lust, in the case of Ben) seem to succeed over any more cautious and more rational approach to check the credentials of their new employer, which is of course what the elusive Dr. Sparling is banking on. They agree to investigate the existence of a village which he tells them has been isolated from the rest of humanity for 200 years. How could this not be a great story?
One answer to that might be that the title is the creepiest thing about it. Or that it uses every tired trope in the book. Or that the two main characters are flat, gauche and unbelievable. Or … but I should give some examples.
The similes then. I think they first started to annoy me when I read:
“the lumps of stone rose through the weeds like distant dolphins.”
What? I think I can honestly say that I have never mistaken rocks in a desolate landscape for frolicking sea creatures. It did absolutely nothing to heighten the bleak atmosphere the author was trying to create, but just made me laugh! This author is supposed to be concerned with “all things literary and macabre” according to the blurb. I had seen little of either so far.
Not only was The Creeper hopelessly inept at creating atmosphere, but Ben and Chloe’s relationship echoed the worst kind of 1940-50s films. Whenever the action should have been at its most menacing, there was Ben lying alone in the tent they shared, getting distracted by Chloe’s legs and wondering whether to put his trousers on; or thinking to himself “raise your eyes, don’t stare at her breasts ... skimpy clothes” etc. Have we really got no further than this in the 21st century? The tale was always told from this adolescent boy’s point of view. One-dimensional stereotypes ... ah, but Chloe would not have fitted into a 1950s set-up because she swears like a trooper. Presumably this was a crass attempt to prove to us that she was empowered. Oh but wait, she’s small and pretty, so that Ben can show his gallant side by wanting to protect her. What decade are we in here? In fact what century? This is pure pulp. And with the underwear scene, pure farce too. A.M. Shine should perhaps have written a comedy.
When we got on to the villagers, it was just embarrassingly bad. I wanted to throw my kindle across the room.
By now I could see where the “gothic” tag came from. It came from the Victorians who believed that physical disabilities such as blindness or lack of hearing were the direct result of sins of the parents or grandparents. This led to such children being hidden away as sources of shame, and this would continue to adulthood. Anyone differently abled would have virtually no life at all, even if one kind person took pity on their situation and tried to shield them. Well let’s all breathe a sigh of relief then that 2 centuries later, this no longer applies in Western Europe.
But doesn’t it? The people in the village of Tír Mallacht have been isolated, not just for one lifetime but for hundreds of years. We are told the gene pool is restricted, and disease and injury are rife, so that:
“Every countenance carried some feature awry, or ever so slightly askew. Though not overly conspicuous in some cases, such peculiarities were ever present … contorted from labour or defect of birth … there was tiredness and there was sadness, and there was also distrust amidst the ugliness.”
The author stresses the “impoverishment ill health and oddity … filth and gormlessness.”
I probably don’t need to give more examples; the message is clear. Ugly = evil, and such people are to be feared as the source of horror. This is the worst sort of folk horror, peopled by characters and “human monsters” from the absolute golden turkey sci-fi films of the 50s. There is an abundance of “de-” words “deranged, deformed, disturbed, dysfunctional” and so on, appealing to the hive mentality that anyone different from the norm should be ostracised as they are bound to be deranged maniacs. Which they are. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; a trope of the worst kind that any self-respecting author should be ashamed of perpetuating.
It isn’t even consistent. For instance, the author seems to be obsessed with the villagers’ dead eyes:
“Eyes as opaque marbles; lightless and veiled with shadow” … “cloudy eyes” … “dead eyes” … “glassy eyes” …“eyes were lifeless prosthetics.”
Any originality in the descriptions (and there is little enough of it) just misfires completely, such as “making her freckles glow like embers” (that I would like to see!) or “The press of his boots on the earth was like an insect crawling on skin.” Or how about the laughable “[The] heavy hand of uncertainty was brushed away before it could hold him back.”
But to resume the eye obsession, there seems to be no consistency. We are told of their “herd mentality … they all behaved the same and looked equally as feeble”, yet:
“Some of them wore hoods, with their beady eyes peering out from the shadows like jewels in muddy water.”
And then:
“her eyes were striking, glossy copper laced with reams of golden thread that snared the sunlight.”
Yes, this “poetic” description is of another of the villagers with their cloudy, dead eyes. Or was it beady eyes? By now it is merely confused.
And it gets worse. What about the “Creeper”? Do they exist? It would be a let-down if not. Yet as the novel staggers on to the ending, the inconsistencies are highlighted. (view spoiler)[The villagers have kept a “chosen one”, to routinely torture and operate on so that he is in permanent agony. (This idea briefly reminded me of Ursula K. Le Guin's excellent “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”.) Then he is set free to terrify selected victims, and embody the words: (hide spoiler)]
“Three times you see him The first night he’s far far away The next night he’s closer So close that you can see him and he can see you On the third night his big ugly face is at your window The fourth night is your last, because then uh-oh.”
The “uh-oh” completely destroys the words’ power. A shame, as the idea of three is a recurring magical concept, but hitting a wrong note is par for the course with this book.
Even now, there might be a hope of rescuing this sorry tale. (view spoiler)[Ben and Chloe, having discovered the poor tortured body in a shuttered hut, are keen to rescue him - or Chloe is at least (not that this is a sexual stereotyope, of course). We readers are not so sure. Isn’t this the Creeper?
We know that the Creeper is a “deformed and deranged” human. We have been told by the little girl who quotes the chant, and Nu with the striking eyes, that the Creeper “used to be a man”. Ben knows he was a man, and at the end he bargains with him, and sacrifices himself to save his daughter. However, the Creeper has to be a supernatural entity, in order to get across the country to where he is supposed to appear next. How could this tortured body, in permanent agony, who can only attack when physically placed by others in position on top of a victim, a hammer put in his hand and his legs cracked and bent into shape each time so that he can kneel … how can he then be strong enough to kill people? It is ridiculous!
The million dollar question is, if he is a real man in permanent agony, how can he then appear in the right place at the right time? And this is where the cheat comes in. The Creeper isn’t a real man at all, but a supernatural entity, whom nobody would be able to bargain with. Nor would the unbelievably amoral Alec sit there like a lemon while the fire takes hold. He is able-bodied. He's not drugged. Why doesn’t he put it out?
It makes no sense. One way to resolve this could be that the Creeper could have been one of the earlier researchers who had disappeared, but had in actuality been subject to their torture rituals, and was now stuck there. We had learned that the Creeper was the way he was, because he had been tortured into that shape. Or Nu, with the striking eyes and mishapen head, might turn out to be Carole, an earlier researcher who had been tortured. That was a lost opportunity I thought, and might have rescued this book from the “ugly = evil” trope.
And what is the point of leaving a “next generation” child, and a frightened, blackmailed detective, both of whom are inconsequential but nicely placed ready for a possible follow-up novel, if you have killed off the threat? (hide spoiler)]
“The superstition would die and so would its monsters.”
A nice idea, but this story does not work.
There are many more problems with this book, but I have written enough. I do not like to give a newish author such a low rating, but the book has so many faults that I cannot in honesty say “it was OK” (i.e. Goodreads’ two star rating). As mentioned, A.M. Shine’s first novel “The Watchers” was well received and has been filmed. As I read this one, I thought at times that it read like a screenplay, so perhaps this one will be too. Nevertheless I feel it is misconceived and badly written, with too many plot holes. It is irritating.
Have you ever take a citizenship test for the country where you live?
Perhaps not. The largest group of people in any country are usually the ones who Have you ever take a citizenship test for the country where you live?
Perhaps not. The largest group of people in any country are usually the ones who were born there. Even in our multicultural UK, only 14.8% were not born here, although the rules for legal citizenship are quite complicated, firstly because of the British Empire, and then the history of the Commonwealth. Nationality legislation began far earlier than we think; there was even an Act of Parliament in 1772 about British subject status. Mostly though what is relevant today dates back to the British Nationality Act of 1948. By this Act, everyone living in a Commonwealth country, including the UK and the Colonies was deemed a British subject. Between 1948 and 1971 (the “Windrush” generation) anyone from the Caribbean was invited to come and live in Britain.
However the Immigration Act of 1971 changed everything, virtually rewriting British immigration law, and introducing the concept of the right of abode. Over the years the good will shown by British citizens to incoming migrants has been chipped away by successively stringent Parliamentary Acts, so labyrinthine in places that guides on how to access the relevant points have to be produced to make sense of them, and plagued with ridiculous bits of bureaucratic paperwork such as the biometric residence permit. It would take several volumes to summarise all the changes since 1971, (and you would almost certainly have fallen asleep before we even got to this century).
So what relevance does this have to the book in question? Well, The Test is about an English resident, Idir Jalil, a dentist who originally emigrated from Iran. He has arrived at a surprisingly swish government centre to take a UK citizenship test. This will either grant his entire family permission to stay in London, or get them deported. This novel surely has to be written by a UK citizen, yes? Perhaps to highlight the various controversial topics which are currently dominating UK News; the divisions between politicians themselves, and opposing factions of the public who are also at each other’s throats. A common area of dispute is the migrants who arrive (or drown in the attempt) as asylum seekers, in small boats having crossed the English Channel. They are fleeing persecution in their birth country, but are all too likely to end up in an insanitary disease-ridden holding centre, or crammed into an offshore barge, where crime has become rife.
What has happened to the traditional British welcome to refugees; the compassionate, caring attitude British people were famed for? When did xenophobia rise its ugly head? Who knows. It’s highly topical, and politicians of all persuasions try to convince the public that we still are a caring nation … Is The Test perhaps a book by someone living in the UK, which tears that myth to shreds?
Well no, it’s not. But neither is it a glossy manifesto proclaiming how magnificent the UK system is, or propaganda of the hectoring “Make the UK Great Again” ilk, thankfully. It’s actually a novel by a Canadian!
A Canadian? Wait a minute … don’t they have their own citizens?
Yes, they do. But as members of the British Empire, Canadians were considered British subjects until 1947. Canada was one of the principal creators of the Commonwealth in the 1930s, and the British monarchy is still part of the Canadian political system. Canada still has a special relationship with the UK, so a Canadian’s view of a fictionalised British citizenship test would be pertinent.
Fictionalised? Yes. In the UK there is such a test, called the “Life in the UK Test”. It costs £50, and has to be taken at one of 30-odd centres in the UK before an application for British citizenship is completed. Of course various other documents also have to be submitted, and the applicant has to swot up on the “Official Handbook for the Life in the UK Test”. The applicant has 45 minutes, in which to answer 24 multiple-choice questions about British traditions and customs.
So here we are with Idir, in a Britain of the not-too-distant future. He is admitted to the assessment room, and we see that his behaviour and demeanour are careful and polite, despite those around him. He seems a model citizen. But what is a “model citizen”? Back to the real life UK today …
British values of national identity go by several names. They are sometimes referred to as Fundamental British Values or Core British Values. They include respect for the rule of law, individual liberty, democracy, and mutual respect for and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. All well and good. All good citizens should uphold these values. Is this then what Idir will be tested on?
Not only us, but Idir’s wife and two children are anxiously watching (through a window) as Idir takes the test. His test has 25 often seemingly ludicrous questions. We hear Idir’s thoughts as he nervously tries to concentrate, and we learn some of his history.
“The Battle of Bosworth Field was fought in … 1485. I am positive. That is the answer. I wonder who writes these questions. How will knowing this make me a better member of British society? My son has no memory of Iran and my daughter was born here. We have been asked many times why we hate freedom, told to go back to the desert many times … but not once has anyone asked me about famous battles of the fifteenth century.”
We learn that Idir’s wife Tidir is a journalist, who has faced intolerable situations, and would probably handle stress better than he could (view spoiler)[. Tidir had regularly been detained and tortured by the Islamic Republic’s National Guard. (hide spoiler)] And we wonder ourselves as Idir does, what relevance some of these questions have to being a good citizen in Britain today. “In which year did Richard III die?” Other questions are designed to test appropriate behaviour and mores, so as we all would, Idir sets about wondering what the test wants him to say, rather than what his first reaction might be.
All seems to be going well (except that I am getting nervous about my own knowledge of British history - and sport culture) when Something Happens.
At this point I am thoroughly engaged with the characters, and something happens in my world too. I had reached the end of my (kindle) sample, and could not easily access a device to buy or borrow it. So I called to someone in the house whom I knew to be on their computer, and asked them to download it for me “right now!” so I could continue. I’ve never done that before (though I have been known to accidentally go past my stop on the tube), so yes, I can say that it is definitely gripping; a real page-turner. It is full of action and heart - and quite short - although I did restrain myself from finishing it then and there.
I can’t really say much more without seriously spoiling the story. For myself I began it without even reading the blurb, although the situation and context was clear from the start. The “British Values Assessment” (BVA) citizenship test had been implemented six months after “the bombs went off”, and was designed in part to weed out any so-called extremism. We might expect any such test to be based on sound psychology, and here we are presented with some novel ideas:
“System justification is the idea that many of our needs can be satisfied by defending and justifying the status quo. It gives stability to our political and economic systems because people are inherently inclined to defend it. It prevents people at a disadvantage from questioning the system that disadvantages them, makes people buy the inevitability of social inequity, ignore or support policies that hurt them.”
Interestingly, the only friends I know to have read this are not normally, or ever, resident in the UK. Neither is it available in any of my libraries, despite having been published over 3 years ago ...
Is it predictable? Not for me, and certainly not the ending. There are plenty of conundrums here, in a kind of philosophical dystopia. Do we have the right to choose? Do we have the right not to choose?
But in all bureaucratic systems, the rule book is law. This novella from 2019 is a thought-provoking and chilling vision of our near future in Britain; a timely and disturbing cautionary tale....more
No, just in case you were wondering, this is definitely not a novel with a dubious title by Agatha Christie! But perhaps it might be as well to keep tNo, just in case you were wondering, this is definitely not a novel with a dubious title by Agatha Christie! But perhaps it might be as well to keep the attitude which lay behind the American children's counting rhyme in mind when reading. All too often this posed as benevolent paternalism, in 19th and 20th century Western privileged classes and cultures. However Five Little Indians tells the experiences of five indigenous children who survived the residential school system in Vancouver, British Columbia, and follows their lives over a 30-year period beginning in the early 1960s.
Once the subject matter of the novel is known, the title is no longer an embarrassingly twee colonial insult, but seems odd. It is a shock that a Cree author should the use the term “Indian” in 2021, to describe the indigenous people native to Canada. In fact Michelle Good uses the word wryly, with a bitter undertone, and continues to use the term throughout the novel. It may offend some, but it is authentic to the time, and serves to emphasise the social mores.
I had heard of the stolen generations: children of Australian Aboriginal descent who were forcibly removed from their families by church missions and the Australian government agencies, right up to 1967. How appalling, I thought, for such a thing to be happening in my own lifetime on the other side of the world (I am English). But I had not realised it was more widepread, and that Canada was operating these residential school right up to 1997. The United Nations has reported that:
““Indian” vocational and residential schools have a long history in the US and Canada, with each seeking to achieve the cultural extermination of indigenous peoples. Throughout the existence of these schools, an uncountable amount of sexual, verbal and physical abuse was inflicted upon these essentially kidnapped youth.”
These so-called “Indian” residential schools were also established in the United States from the mid-17th to the early 20th centuries, with a primary objective of “civilising” or assimilating Native American children and youth into European American culture. Canada, America and Australia all had the same aim: to bring Aboriginal peoples within the realm of western society. Thus, much of the education practice, and the very way of life in residential schools and missions and other institutions, was aimed at inculcating European beliefs in Aboriginal children.
The entire basis of such schools can now be seen as misguided, but in practice it was even worse than that. Ironically, the people put in charge of such places were not benevolent (albeit blinkered). They seem to have been the worst sort of extremists; religious zealots, with the desire to punish and inflict pain on those in their charge.
The internet is full of horrific stories from these institutions. In May 2021, 215 bodies of children were found buried on Kamloops Indian Residential School grounds in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. Some were believed to be as young as three years old. Another institution, the St. Anne’s Indian Residential School in Ontario took all the Cree children they could find from the Fort Albany First Nation and the surrounding area. Many former students of St. Anne’s describe experiencing physical, psychological and sexual abuse while at the school. An electric chair was said to be used “for punishment and sport”. There were hundreds of suspicious deaths between 1941 and 1972, and some adults were charged. The effect of such a brutal system on the survivors is unimaginable.
Some tried desperately to avoid their children being snatched. In Five Little Indians:
“Jim shook his head at us. His parents moved, taking him acoss the line to the States before the priest could come for him, so he didn’t know what it was like. His parents told him about it, because they had gone to one of the Indian schools, but he didn’t really understand. How could anyone?”
In another case:
“My mother had never been out of Saskatchewan and rarely left the reserve. She didn’t need to be anywhere else. That was her home and the home of her parents and grandparents back to when Treaty Six was signed by her great-grandfather, Pihew-kamihkosit, for whom our Red Pheasant reserve was named”.
But this child’s aunt had married a mooniaw (a white man) and now lived a thousand miles away on the central coast of British Columbia. Because she was often alone while her husband was away in the logging camps, her sister went for a visit. It was to be a special long summer idyll for the family to be together.
It is a lovely family visit, with lavish 6th birthday celebrations. (view spoiler)[ Little Howie's auntie happily passes the time of day with her Catholic priest, telling him of the birthday visit, and that the child had a place to take up shortly in a Cree school on their reservation. All seems well, but later the priest comes back with a police officer, who grabs the child and carries him away to the Indian residential school. It does not make any difference that they do not live there any longer. He is there right now, is 6 years old, and the law must be enforced. No amount of formal applications, letter writing and appeals by the mother over the next decade make any difference. Neither is the mother ever allowed to see her child in the residential school (hide spoiler)]
There are many such stories, and here we become engrossed in five such, with other wretched victims of the system venturing in and out of the narrative. Some meet a tragic end. The chapters switch between the five, with flashback episodes describing their years of abuse.
I did not know of the Canadian Indian residential school system, nor of the cruelties routinely perpetrated there. But for the author of Five Little Indians, it was all too familiar. Michelle Good did not experience it for herself, but tells us in her afterword that these are the stories of her mother and grandmother, both of whom were survivors of the residential school system. When the author was growing up, her mother would talk about the traumatic histories and experiences of the childen she had known, who had been incarcerated with her there. Five Little Indians is based on her mother’s experiences.
Michelle Good is a writer, retired lawyer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. Her poems, short stories and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada. She was born in Kitimat, British Columbia and moved to Vancouver when she was a teenager, living in that area until her early 20s, when she started working with First Nations communities throughout British Columbia. Pursuing a master of fine arts degree, her thesis became the basis for this first novel, which has won many awards.
Part of Five Little Indians is set in the Red Pheasant Cree Reserve in Saskatchewan, and those episodes powerfully convey a different way of looking at the world; the perceptions and experience so essential, precious and sacred to those born in the Cree culture, but which were denied to so many who had been snatched. An outsider like me can just glimpse it: an impression of angel ancestors above the birch trees will stay with me for a long while.
With Five Little Indians, Michelle Good had decided to tell the story of one child whom she called Kenny. She then realised that there were many more stories she needed to tell; many different responses and types of trauma. She needed to convey the legacy of Canada’s residential school system: the routine abuse, the broken families, coupled with inadequate education and the ongoing racist cruelty in the world outside, such as an employer who spitefully told the newly released (view spoiler)[Lucy (hide spoiler)]:
“You Indian chicks are good for two things, and both of them happen in motel rooms.”
But above all, the author wanted to reveal the hatred which fuelled a systemic destruction of indigenous communities, cultures, and peoples.
So we meet Kenny, Lucy, Maisie, Clara and Howie, all of whom “survived” a decade or so of detention. (The inverted commas are because survival is not descriptive of the numbed or broken souls they have each become). Quite literally snatched when they were around 6 years old, they are each released individually a decade later, back into the city of Vancouver, into “that mile of broken souls I now call home”. They had to make their way as best they could, with just a few coins, no skills, no experience of life or the social system, and no support. And they were left full of fear and confusion, petrified of a society who constantly reminded them they did not want “their kind”. Not surprisingly, it was the seedy downtown Eastside of Vancouver where each landed:
“the broken heart of the city. The hookers and addicts and runaway teens, johns and predators scouting their prey, all roamed the core.”
Being tolerated was the best they could expect, and sometimes the safest option was to accept being shrugged off or exploited by an uncaring world. Each struggled to stay unnoticed and make a life, accepting a pittance for the work nobody else would do; cleaning up someone else’s mess, or a hard life on the road with casual work, picking crops or logging, drifting and surviving:
“through the fields of Washington … picking apples, through the coastal fishing grounds, the logging camps, the dish pits and grease pits and flop houses.”
Their stories begin in 1967. They are diverse, and swerve between being hardhitting and heartbreaking. Impossibly institutionalised and confused, flashes of their earlier life would come into their minds:
“Where was the law then when he was beating us, breaking bones, and other, even worse things?”
“I just don’t know what to do … It’s like most of me is gone and I can’t get it back.”
None escape unscathed, although two of those dumped back into society eventually develop post-abuse coping strategies. They somehow create happy and fulfilling lives for themselves, rising above their early years of pain. Others though are irreparably traumatised. (view spoiler)[ Maisie takes an overdose of heroin, (hide spoiler)] never able to escape the sexual abuse they suffered in an incredibly powerful and dramatic chapter. At no point is any sexual abuse described in this book, but it is quite evident from the skilful writing and the character’s victim mentality, despising themselves and searching out appallingly rough treatment to calm the addiction, that this is what had taken place. Others too agonise internally:
“Brother was bothering him too. That creep went after so many of those little boys.”
(view spoiler)[Kenny dies from alcohol poisoning (hide spoiler)] never able to settle in one place, or deal with their past except by drowning their real sorrows. (view spoiler)[Howie spends several years in prison, having chanced to meet the “Father” who had regularly beaten and abused him, and assaulted him in a moment of fury. Poignantly, the prison life is familiar: “the prison routine, so similar to the one at the Mission”(hide spoiler)]. It is yet another example of being trapped by an addiction to the patterns of victimisation.
None of those taken ever have a good relationship with their parents, who are equally damaged and may not survive.
The starting point for Michelle Good’s novel came in May 2021 when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in British Columbia uncovered the remains of those 215 children on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. The news had an profound emotional effect on the author. Based in southern British Columbia herself, and with her mother’s history, it felt very personal:
“That first weekend after the Kamloops announcement was really rough. I told a friend of mine that I felt catatonic after that announcement. It’s not because we didn’t know. We did know. People have been talking about this for years and years. But there’s never been any support to resolve this …”
By September 2021, more than 1300 graves had been found across the sites of 5 former residential schools in Canada. Such shameful cultural genocide is a legacy of Canada’s troubled colonial history. However this is not the place to go into what happened next. The information is easy enough to find, and my reaction echoes the general feeling of “too little, too late”.
Five Little Indians was Michelle Good’s response, and although fictional, it enables readers to get a glimpe into the degradation, persecution, trauma and pain innocent children and their families suffered, for no other reason than their ethnicity. There was nothing similar in the UK, save perhaps the Magdalene Laundries, institutions usually run by Roman Catholic orders, to house unmarried mothers. These young girls were not allowed to keep their babies, nor to know where they ended up. Their daily drudgery was a punishment.
But they were in Ireland, so for England we would need to go back to Charles Dickens, who based his Dotheboys Hall in “Nicholas Nickleby” on a real institution (Bowes Academy) with similar brutal treatment, starvation and gross neglect of disease. Records after a public outcry revealed that many children died of starvation, untreated disease and blindness, just as in Five Little Indians I was also reminded of another of his novels, “Oliver Twist”, in which the Beadle's response to the complaint:
“The prices allowed by the board are very small” is the heavily ironic “So are the coffins.”
Five Little Indians tells how on arrival an indigenous girl, suffering from shock, would be grabbed by “Sister” to:
“cut her long braids, douse her in green powder and take her clothes away, replacing them with a used brown shift.”
Boys would have the same treatment, although (view spoiler)[Kenny, held as a hero by the others as he regularly tried to escape, and finally did, was made to wear a purple flowered dress to disgrace him even more. (hide spoiler)] All the children, regardless of gender, were routinely shaved so roughly that their scalps were cut and bleeding:
“... her body as a little child covered in bruises, her head shorn, thin to the point of emaciation.”
The lesions remained on the scalps as adults - as did those from the beatings. And they were routinely starved, so that they would eat grass whenever outside, one child showing another what type of plant was safe. Any child so traumatised that they wet the bed would have the piss-laden sheet wrapped aound their head, ensuring that the other children would avoid them because of the smell.
(view spoiler)[ Sister Mary’s response to the fatally ill child Lily, was to make her work even harder. And Brother regularly collected tiny Howie from his bed to beat - and probably worse - only stopping when the blood-covered child was taken to the sanitorium (hide spoiler)]. Dickens visited the Bowes Academy; he did not exaggerate, and neither did the reports in “The Times” newspaper. But Dickens was writing in the 19th century. I have no doubt that the stories shared here are equally authentic, so it seemed almost unbelievable to me that this should be happening in my lifetime, in a developed country.
Perhaps you do not like harrowing reads. Neither do I, never reading true crime, or misery sagas. I dislike explicit hardhitting details. Five Little Indians is not an easy read. It is intended for adult readers and describes the abuse of children, so might not be appropriate for more sensitive readers. But there is nothing here which is gratuitous, or exaggerated for the shock element, although one early section titled (view spoiler)[Maisie (hide spoiler)] suddenly switches to a first person narrator. The details there were horrifying, and there was a lot of foul language to hammer it home. To be honest I do not think this added anything, and would have preferred a consistent approach, but it does not move the book from being a four star read for me. It is self-contained, so sensitive or easily offended readers could miss this chapter out.
Mostly we infer the violence from the torment suffered by the victims. Sometimes they cannot bring themselves to remember the details, even years later. (view spoiler)[ Kenny for instance, was counselled by a fellow sufferer, Clara, now trained in Law and appointed to help, and testified in a Court prosecution, but forcing himself to remember broke him (hide spoiler)]. This is skilful writing, making us feel great empathy with the characters, and rooting for them through all their troubles. (view spoiler)[ When Clara and her dog have a desperate car chase across the chaparral, trying to get across the border to an Indian reservation, hotly pursued by the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police), (hide spoiler)] I was on the edge of my seat, whilst also feeling angry that anyone should have to live in an area of land marked out for them. To have land set aside for the exclusive use of First Nations, to protect their heritage, arguably sounds good in principle, but not if they are persecuted elsewhere. And the history of selling off part of the reservation lands that were rich in oil and gas reserves continued.
So if you are toying with the idea of reading this, I would say be warned and take a deep breath, but go ahead. This book gives an important eye-opening glimpse into what many indigenous residential school survivors have had to endure, after living through the abuse and neglect suffered at these institutions. It is a powerful and dramatic story, full of heart, even to the next generation. It gives a voice to five solitary survivors of Canada’s residential school system. These stories are not from antiquity, nor buried in the annals of time, but in living history.
“That little birch tree. Even here they shine.”
“the first shot of deep orange in the leaves of the poplar trees, the silver twinkle of the birch along the creek in the pasture calming into soft fall yellow”
“[She] felt the same way she had back then, with those lilting songs dancing among the shimmering birch leaves. Something that had been gone a long time filled her again, like her heart had suddenly started beating again after a long silence.”...more
“What is dying anyway? I let this impossible question fill the darkness of my bedroom. I thought about how somebody was always dying somewhere, at any“What is dying anyway? I let this impossible question fill the darkness of my bedroom. I thought about how somebody was always dying somewhere, at any given moment. This isn’t a fable or a joke or an abstract idea. People are always dying. It’s a perfect truth. No matter how we live our lives, we all die sooner or later. In which case, living is really just waiting to die. And if that’s true, why bother living at all?”
Heaven was written in 2009, and its English translation was published in 2021. It is the second novel by Mieko Kawakami to be translated into English. Mieko Kawakami is a prize-winning Japanese literary author who does not shy away from controversial issues. Another internationally best-selling novel by her is “Breasts and Eggs” in which she was described as writing “with a bracing lack of sentimentality”. In this case, the novel is centred on teenage bullying, and written straightforwardly, so that the prose is simple and easy to read. However the theme is unremitting, and some episodes are described graphically enough for it to be called by some “torture porn”.
We begin with a 14-year old unnamed narrator, who is constantly bullied at school and called “Eyes” because he has a lazy eye (strabismus). He finds a note from someone saying “we should be friends”. After some thought he responds, and it turns out that it is from a classmate called Kojima. Kojima is also bullied, because she comes from a poor family, has kinky hair, does not like to take baths, and has dirty clothes. The two victims carry on their friendship mainly through written notes. They do meet up (and you can imagine the fallout from their tormentors) but never discuss the bullying episodes or abuse they receive. The bullying increases in intensity as the plot continues.
I found it hardhitting and heartbreaking in equal measure. Both the narrator and Kojima seemed to be in a cycle of passive acceptance.
“Even if something happens to us, even if we die and never have to deal with them again, the same thing will happen to someone, somewhere. The same thing. The weak always go through this, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Because the strong never go away. That’s why you want to pretend to be like them, isn’t it? You want to join them.”
The main bully is a popular boy, Momose. Ninimoya, his friend who complies and falls in with Momose, tells Kojima that bullies act that way, just because they are able to do so. We know that for this age group, social pressures mean that all their peers are tempted to side with, or look away from, the bullies. Ninimoya is handsome and well-liked, and no adult seems to be concerned. Oddly, no parents or teachers notice Ninomiya and Momose’s swaggering demeanour, nor the clues which denote a bullied child. Were the adults fearful for some reason?
Then I realised that the book is about a culture of bullying, and a mindset where acceptance denotes strength. This novel is set in Japan, in 1991. I have learned that bullying is not seen as a problem, as it is here in the UK. Indeed it is brutal, and common in Japan, and there is an extremely high suicide rate. Teachers even have a name for “normal” children; i.e. those who are deemed accepted. “Mina-san” means “everybody”, but anyone who is different from the accepted convention would be excluded from this description. Inclusivity of differently abled children, or anyone who has special needs, does not exist. Uniform normality is the aim, and children are encouraged to reject anything else.
The Japanese author Haruki Murakami has called Mieko Kawakami his favourite young novelist, which is quite telling. When I realised that I would not complete this read, I considered the wider significance of this book, and the influence of Nietzschean philosophy. The blurb says:
“These raw and realistic portrayals of bullying are counterbalanced by textured exposition of the philosophical and religious debates concerning violence to which the weak are subjected.”
Heaven is a bleakly savage read, which has been called “a raw, painful, and tender portrait of adolescent misery”. Momose’s view is nihilistic. One child eventually resists, but there will be no true winners in this novel. I did not complete reading this book, as I found it too disturbing. My rating stays at my default, based on the quality of the writing and the insights of the author, but I had no wish to put myself through the wringer any further.
“But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.”
“Because we’re always in pain, we know exactly what it means to hurt somebody else.”
“Listen, if there is a hell, we’re in it. And if there’s a heaven, we’re already there. This is it.”
And the title? It is after a painting in the story, to which Kojima gave a new name. She believed that accepting bullying helped to purify her, although the author of Heaven makes it clear that this attitude harms Kojima.
I was looking forward to “a mesmerising novel of suspense”, as the blurb promised, and the writing style seemed good to begin with. But susNot for me.
I was looking forward to “a mesmerising novel of suspense”, as the blurb promised, and the writing style seemed good to begin with. But suspense needs building, to engage the reader. Otherwise it’s just horror. I’m not sure there was anywhere to go for me, after a brutal bludgeoning of a wild animal in the first few pages, before we know why. (Yes, I know an animal in the “wrong” place at the wrong time is classed by humans as vermin. I wonder how the animal feels about human invasion into its territory.) So that put me off a bit.
It now occurs to me that this is the third contemporary novel I’ve read about a dark “cabin in the woods” in just a few months. Maybe it’s an American horror subgenre … oh no, one was Polish (and very good!) It could be another trope, such as tales from yesteryear set in creepy European castles, perhaps. Oddly I usually enjoy those, yet I have neither stayed in a cabin nor a castle.
Please read others’ reviews, which are mostly complimentary. These notes are really a reminder to myself not to try this one again!...more
Bionic Jean
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