This is the story of a brother and sister, at least that’s what the author, Sarah Winman, says of her debut novel. You could loosely describe it as that, but only loosely. It’s not a story so much as a disjointed diary about growing up. A chain of anecdotes and incidents strung together with a peppering of vivid, ebullient characters which seem to leap out of a painter’s colourful portrait of England. The narrator is Eleanor Maud, a pre-teen girl, from whom we hear about her parents, her brother, her only friend from school, her aunt Nancy and the entire gamut of people who come to live as their paying guests in Cornwall, among them Arthur and Ginger who become fixtures in the book. The events which occur in their lives form the pastiche against which the novel is backdropped. Like at the beginning of the novel, when Elly is born in 1968, the author postscripts it with three important events from that year — the Paris uprising, the Tet offensive during the Vietnam War, and Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. Elly is a somewhat weird combination of a girl, who seems beyond her years when it comes to talking to people much beyond her age bracket but is incapable of making friends her own age, until Jenny Penny, who seems to rate higher on the weirdness scale, comes along. Joe is her protective brother five years older and they seem to have no secrets from each other. Together they remind you of Scout and Jem Finch from the Harper Lee classic. They perceive the world as they see it, not hazed by the glasses of prejudice or any worldly markers. Elly, in all innocent honesty, refers to Jesus Christ as a mistake as it was an unplanned pregnancy, earning the “wrath” of the vicar; and can’t comprehend what is blasphemous, as her teacher says, in naming her pet rabbit God. Elly is also perceptive enough when her brother Joe falls in love with Charlie and confronts him when he breaks her brother’s heart. There are also instances of abuse that the novel talks about and how it affects three people in different ways: In Elly’s case, she manages to close the lid on it and seems to go through life without thinking about it; Jenny Penny seems to be cut out for the same trailer domestic life that her mother had; while Elly’s father can’t exorcise his guilt for arguing and winning the case of a man charged with child molestation. Violence, and the futility of it, is a parallel theme of the novel. There are subsequent references to the political bombings of the ‘70s, John Lennon’s killing, Princess Diana’s death, and finally 9/11, which doesn’t serve just as a big incident in the timeline of the novel but something that hits close to home for the Mauds. The subsequent years are not documented. It is as if our diarist had stopped writing, and the novel picks up Elly when she is an off-and-on journalist, Joe works in New York and Jenny Penny is in prison serving time for killing her violent husband. Elly tries to meet Jenny, unsuccessfully, though they correspond through letters, even as Charlie makes his way back into Joe’s life. Joe, who’s in New York, works at the Twin Towers, and the year is 2001. What follows is a struggle between hope and despair, life and death even as you wonder as you turn the pages as to what will win. Will Joe beat the pessimism his family is mired in and come out alive Will Jenny Penny beat her own fears and apprehensions and be ready to start afresh, bidding goodbye to her ugly past Winman’s book is about picking up the pieces and putting them together, however shattered they may be. And she infuses pain, agony, happiness and elation and even adds a touch of humour in what would otherwise be pathetic. When Arthur claims to know exactly how he’s going to die, you feel a tinge of pain, but it gives way to laughter when you find out how: a coconut is going to fall on his head.
