girl a (abigail dean)

glass half-full

Girl A is an engrossing, slightly mysterious read, narrated by the titular character, one of six sibling survivors of a ‘house of horrors’ in Northern England. When his dreams of being a preacher founder, their father goes quietly mad, chaining his children to their beds, refusing to let them out, turning the house into a rubbish-strewn prison. Finally Girl A escapes and frees the five surviving children. This is the hinge point of the novel, which works both backwards and forwards, narrating the history of the house in flashback as well as Girl A’s subsequent life story. The novel opens with the mother dying in prison. Girl A decides she wants to turn the house of horrors into a community centre, as a way of exorcising the evil, and has to get her siblings’ legal approval. After being released from the house, the siblings were all adopted, and contact between them is minimal, but Girl A goes on her mission which lends the novel a narrative thread. The book is fluidly written, with many a limpid turn of phrase. On one level it’s a study of post traumatic shock and survival, on another it might have been a gothic tinged investigation of religious extremism.

glass half-empty

Probably the most intriguing figure in the novel is the children’s monstrous father. Who has a Jim Jones quality to him. Believing himself to be a charismatic preacher, when that dream is punctured he turns against his own. This is a study of power unhinged. It made me think regularly of the unfettered lunacy that has flourished in the Anglo-Saxon world over the course of the past decade, where fundamentalism allied to libertarianism has spawned monsters and terrible political damage. Having said which, the character of the father always feels slightly deific in the novel. It hints at far more than it reveals. The book swims in his slipstream, just as his children do. It feels as though the novel tiptoes to the edge of insanity and then delicately steers around it, in an eminently British fashion. Which lends the novel a slightly salubrious feel: we read on because we want to know about the horrors, the damage this has caused, and the novel titillates with Girl A’s masochistic tendencies and her fantasising, rather than delivering any real sense of shock, deviance or horror. One can’t help thinking that part of the reason for the novel’s success, apart from the fact it is eminently well-written, is that it takes the reader down a dark road, but then pulls back and leaves us with the redeemed vision of the redesigned house of horrors instead.