The Girl in the Red Coat by Kate HamerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
It was difficult to get into this book. The opening Chapters seem to lack sufficient context and I struggled to get a feel for the story. A series of fragments are presented that are obviously going to be connected later, but the narrative was a little clunky. It was also extremely difficult to suspend my disbelief an eight-year old who spoke the language of an adult. The mother and the daughter seemed to have the same voice and that annoyed me quite a lot. Too many characters were briefly mentioned before disappearing. And the paranoia or anxiety of the mother, Beth, was rather too self-absorbed and introspective to be of much interest. The characters were not well placed in the world. As I got more frustrated with where this story might be going, I glanced at a couple of reviews online and some of the mentioned the “magical realism” that creeps into the story. I like magical realism in the hand of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, so I gritted my teeth and rushed through a lot of Chapters that seemed to move the story along far too slowly. I skipped along until I finally started to find it interesting, about half-way in.
I was glad that I stuck at it. The magical realism was not the colourful and vivid metaphor that Marquez does, but something much more subtle and a little creepy. Beth’s daughter, Carmel, had been stolen away on a foggy day from a book fair and spirited away to USA by a creepy old man who managed to persuade her that her mother had been killed in an accident and her father was uninterested in looking after her. He made out that he was her Grandfather. He had found out quite a lot about her, apparently from some of the things she had said when she had raised her hand and asked a question at a talk by an author in the book fair. Again, I found this rather far-fetched, but it worked as a device to reveal to the kidnapper some information he could use to mislead her.
There is a lot of emotional hand-wringing back home as the mother realises that she has lost her daughter without a trace. People do the usual things without much surprise, as more characters swim in and out of focus. Grudgingly, I begin to acknowledge that there is an inner consistency that the language and perspective is predominantly internal monologues, and these are crafted well to reveal how different our thoughts and actions appear to ourselves, compared to how they seem to others. So I started to get used to the differences between the internal voice of the main protagonists and how they might be perceived by their listeners. I realised that this was a sophisticated approach to the writing that was more absorbing than a lot of the superficial pap that gets published as novels.
In the USA, Carmel is encouraged to develop here apparent powers of spiritual healing. She is not really aware of being held against her will, but she does feel dominated by the man she believes to be her grandfather. It becomes less claustrophobic and more easy to accept the strange world that they have constructed for themselves once we get more into the nuclear assemble of Gramps, his partner, Dorothy, and Dorothy’s two daughters, who are a similar age to Carmel. As the story evolves through Carmel’s eyes, it gets more interesting and convincing. And the earlier Chapters now start to make sense. For example, when Carmel is going through the healing process at the command of Gramps, she imagines herself being inside the head of the person she is healing. This is just the same as how Beth imagined herself inside the brain or Carmel, looking out through her eyes in the first Chapter. And the maze where Beth lost Carmel at the beginning becomes a metaphor for the complexity of being inside someone else’s brain. Just as Carmel looked up to the sky at the beginning in the maze, seeing birds flying across in the narrow patch sky between the yew hedge that constructed the maze, so she got risked getting stuck in the maze of someone’s brain as she looked out of their eyes while trying to heal them. No wonder Beth thought of Carmel as her ‘little hedge-child’. This was because she sometimes looked as though she had been dragged through a hedge backwards, but it was intriguing that the first time she lost Carmel, it was in a yew-hedge maze.
From the middle to the end, I read the book avidly. The characters came to life for me and I enjoyed the fiction of spiritual healing being a real thing. I like the twig soup served to her by one of the Dorothy’s girls, as it exactly matched the twig dinners that Carmel had made in the first Chapter. So, ultimately, the structure of the narrative was revealed as an enjoyable circle as every aspect that was opened up at the beginning was closed at the end, coming full circle in a very satisfying way.
There was a lot of sadness in this book. A deep sense of loss runs through everything. Loss at the demise of marriage relationships. Loss of a daughter, loss of the estranged parents of Beth, loss of her friends and her future. The first half involves a lot of prolonged exploration of the sadness of loss and I found some of that a bit overcooked. The second half involves the transformation of Beth and Carmel into more resilient people, still desperately missing each other, but coming to terms with their respective sense of loss and making the most of their new lives as best they could. The climax of the book with the weird religious gathering, Carmel’s maturing into a young independent woman, Beth’s new career as a nurse, Gramps becoming progressively more unwell and useless, and the loss of the spirituality all round as the reality of the world finally gets in (police arresting religious extremists, ice storms creating mayhem, Carmel being turned away by some from who she seeks help). The cleverly sustained sense of hope throughout the whole story finally gets us the conclusion that must have been the only way to resolve this story as Beth and Carmel are finally reunited. Finally, the tears are for joy, rather than for loss and everyone is in a better place.
So, a classic story line, really, with all the loose ends tied up and some very carefully constructed narrative devices used to good effect. This is Kate Hamer’s debut novel. It will be interesting to see how she develops her style and approach to storytelling in her subsequent books. I like her.
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