FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBY reviews AnnabelBy Kathleen Winter, Cape, 461pp, £12.99
WAYNE IS the first and only baby born to a couple already beginning to feel the weight of their differences. Jacinta is a town girl trained as a school teacher. She is drawn to classical music and making her home beautiful, whereas her husband, Treadway, is a trapper, an outdoors man whose true passion is the magnificent if harsh northeastern Canadian coastal world of Labrador. “Treadway loved his wife because he had promised he would. But the centre of the wilderness called him and he loved that centre more than any promise.”
It is a village society in which the men are absent for months, hunting and fishing, providing for their families, while the women accept that they stay at home, raising the children.
The action begins in 1968, with the birth of the child, yet Kathleen Winter’s powerful and important debut might as well have been set a century ago. Vital to the story, which has all the elements of a human tragedy, is the tough, remote physical environment.
The baby has male and female sex organs. For a brief period this is kept from the father while Jacinta the mother initially appears capable of dealing with what is a complex act of nature. A decision is made and the doctor performs a procedure that will make the baby into a son for Treadway. Jacinta continues to love her secret daughter. Winter has a dramatic story to tell and assembles a strong set of core characters.
Even more important than the parents is Thomasina, a neighbour who becomes Wayne’s most consistent support. She had been present at the home birth and noticed that the baby was different. After losing her husband and daughter in an accident Thomasina, always practical, who “knew how to keep going”, becomes philosophical. Perhaps she also sees the graceful Wayne as an extension of the person her dead daughter may have become.
From the outset, Winter establishes the contrasting world of male and female. Jacinta in attempting to help preserve her child’s ambiguities moves further away from her husband. But Treadway is no villain. “He was a soft-hearted man when it came to anyone he felt was less practically talented than himself, and this covered a lot of people.”
Winter has written a novel concerned with the subject of identity. Several of the characters are confronting the question of exactly who they are. Annabelcould be seen as a polemic because of the seriousness of the issues. But Winter is as subtle as she is candid and the occasional flashes of irony are gentle. Most ironic of all is the discovery that Wayne, for all his trials, is the least tormented. He is delicate and sensitive, a dreamer engaged in secret yearning who responds to the vulnerability he sees around him. He loves symmetry, decoration, the natural world, science and architecture. Wayne is a remarkable individual, more hero than victim and is described as having a Chagall-like quality. There is no rage, no self-pity, just curiosity, imagination and above all, quiet courage, yet he is never sentimentalised.
Winter does not expose Treadway as a brutal father, but rather as a bewildered man, incapable of grasping that his son is more interested in beauty than in testing himself against the elements or other boys.
Wayne’s fascination with synchronised swimming, which begins when the World Aquatic Championships are televised, fills Treadway with horror: “What do you want to watch that for?” he asks and suggests that Wayne look at hockey instead. But the boy is captivated. When he mentions to his mother that he would like to emulate the Russian soloist swimmer who had swum to the music of Scheherazade, Jacinta’s reply is interesting: “Wayne, your dad was asking me about that. He doesn’t think there are any boy synchronised swimmers.”
Winter evokes a convincing portrait of a household in which the curious child continually fires questions at the mother and even asks her about buying a swimming pool. Their interaction is believable and becomes all the more poignant as the mother-child relationship eventually falters. In time, Jacinta drifts away, incapable of helping him and losing all interest in her home – although she does become obsessed with crochet.
But long before this there is a heartbreaking sequence which begins innocently as 12-year-old Wayne and his friend, Wally, a girl intent on becoming an opera singer, set out to build a hut over a nearby stream. Treadway takes over and wants to construct a fort similar to the ones he had built as a boy and the project excites him.
Wayne and Wally create a palace of dreams not a military camp and Treadway is confused and worried. He takes action with appalling results. Even worse is his attempt to counter his behaviour by finally buying Wayne a dog. Slow-moving and detailed, the narrative raises many questions and for all the explicit descriptions and the shocking attack made on Wayne after he has left home, this mainstream literary novel – shortlisted for this year’s Orange Prize – would be an interesting choice for young adults and exam classes.
It is too simple to say that Winter has written a story about a hermaphrodite. This is a human and humane book about living and the instinct to survive and to protect. It is also about friendship, parental love and its limitations.
Late in the novel, after Wayne has set out into a brutal world, his father, a man who had always loved silence, reading and solitude, comes to avenge his son. Winter, in creating a hero who is consummately feminine, also acknowledges the endurance and independence inherited from his father, the same father who advises him not to drive from Canada. “Trains and ferries will give you a real journey to Boston,” he says.
Perhaps this is Winter’s achievement; her brave, intelligent novel is about a journey to truth – and one that Wayne is unafraid of taking.
EILEEN BATTERSBY is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
