I do enjoy exploring unexpected links between the novels I’ve been reading. A gritty story of the real-life dangers faced by illegal immigrants on the streets of contemporary Cape Town seems a world away from the remote homestead in 1920s Alaska in which Eowyn Ivey’s modern fairytale is set. Yet, apart from being debut novels and the happenstance of my reading them in sequence, both are stories of survival with an unusually pale-skinned girl at their hearts. In addition, The Snow Child also gives me an opportunity to acknowledge the writing of a couple of other bloggers whose support I cherish, while Zebra Crossing has served as the inspiration for my response to Charli Mills’s latest flash fiction challenge.
It’s some years now since I had any interest in holidaying abroad – or venturing on holiday at all, if I’m entirely honest – and my last trip outside Europe could well be part of the reason. This was a fascinating botanical tour of Madagascar but, because we were focused on the flora, our interactions with the local people were somewhat limited and often unsettling to my woolly-liberal constitution. I wrote about this in my post On Memory and Imagination on the publication of my short story, Silver Bangles, a fictionalised account of an incident on that trip that brought the disparities in wealth between the locals and the tourists into sharp relief. A similar encounter provided the material (if that doesn’t sound too disrespectful) for my water-themed flash. But a third uncomfortable event from that holiday – in which I dithered about donating my sunscreen lotion to a family with albinism seen from the comfort of our bus in a remote village – hasn’t yet made it into my fiction.
It’s some years now since I had any interest in holidaying abroad – or venturing on holiday at all, if I’m entirely honest – and my last trip outside Europe could well be part of the reason. This was a fascinating botanical tour of Madagascar but, because we were focused on the flora, our interactions with the local people were somewhat limited and often unsettling to my woolly-liberal constitution. I wrote about this in my post On Memory and Imagination on the publication of my short story, Silver Bangles, a fictionalised account of an incident on that trip that brought the disparities in wealth between the locals and the tourists into sharp relief. A similar encounter provided the material (if that doesn’t sound too disrespectful) for my water-themed flash. But a third uncomfortable event from that holiday – in which I dithered about donating my sunscreen lotion to a family with albinism seen from the comfort of our bus in a remote village – hasn’t yet made it into my fiction.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that I was drawn to Zebra Crossing by the character of a young albino woman coming of age under a blistering African sun. Chipo means gift in her native Shona, but neither the father who abandons the family when she is born, nor her elder brother, George, who reluctantly takes care of her, nor her neighbours nor strangers perceive her this way. Only her mother treats her as anything close to normal and she has died before the story even begins. Pushed out of school by politics and poverty, and subsequently out of work, Chipo and George set out in true hero’s-journey fashion from their home in Zimbabwe to seek a better life in South Africa on the brink of hosting the World Cup. Lodging with George’s childhood friends, David and Peter, among the destitute of myriad African countries, Chipo finds a role cooking and cleaning for the men. Only David, and the mysterious Jean-Paul who rarely leaves his room, show her any respect or kindness and it takes Chipo a long time to realise that David’s tolerance of her is never going to blossom into love. Yet, in an effort to increase his affection, she consults the unscrupulous Dr Ongani, setting in motion the sequence of events that will lead to the witchdoctor co-opting the Zimbabweans into a get-rich-quick scheme that exploits both Chipo and the superstitions about albinism held by the desperate.
Originally published in South Africa and now available in North America, Great Britain and Australia via Oneworld Publications (who provided my review copy), this is a compassionate account of what it might feel like to be on the receiving end of people’s hatred of difference. However, I found my empathy diluted by the uneven pace, lingering too long on the period of relative stability, with Dr Ongani not making an appearance until two-thirds of the way through. Nevertheless, Chipo has got inside me enough to attempt my own version of her story. As I’ve done once before, my 99-word flash this week is part fanfiction; the prompt, this time, is to show a character confronting something worse than death:
Originally published in South Africa and now available in North America, Great Britain and Australia via Oneworld Publications (who provided my review copy), this is a compassionate account of what it might feel like to be on the receiving end of people’s hatred of difference. However, I found my empathy diluted by the uneven pace, lingering too long on the period of relative stability, with Dr Ongani not making an appearance until two-thirds of the way through. Nevertheless, Chipo has got inside me enough to attempt my own version of her story. As I’ve done once before, my 99-word flash this week is part fanfiction; the prompt, this time, is to show a character confronting something worse than death:
The other children called me Ghost Girl, but Mama said I was special. When the burning sun had gone to bed, we played with sticks and stones in the dirt outside our hut.
Mama warned me not to walk in the forest. The medicine man would catch me, she said. But, with Mama dead, how else could I get the wood to cook my food?
Now the doctor says I’m special, so special the people travel miles to swap a goat for a lock of my pure-white hair. An ox for a finger. A bicycle for my beating heart.
Mama warned me not to walk in the forest. The medicine man would catch me, she said. But, with Mama dead, how else could I get the wood to cook my food?
Now the doctor says I’m special, so special the people travel miles to swap a goat for a lock of my pure-white hair. An ox for a finger. A bicycle for my beating heart.
Faina, the ghostly girl in The Snow Child, is never described as albino, but she does have very pale skin, white-blonde hair and eyelashes. She’s a shy, feral thing who thrives in the snowy wilderness of an underpopulated Alaska. If people are suspicious of her initially they’re soon won over by her innocence and determination, and her delicate beauty. Faina is special in a good way, and she enters the lives of Jack and Mabel at the precise moment they need something to believe in. In middle age, both separately haunted by a stillborn child many years before, they have staked everything on a fresh start, struggling to make a living farming in the all-too-brief northern summers. They’ve all but given up when the child arrives, seemingly as if they’ve created her from the girl they fashioned from the snow.
Based on an actual fairytale, The Snow Child straddles reality and fantasy and, for me, gets the balance just right. The pleasures and strains of a mature marriage; the harshness and beauty of the landscape; the compromises of friendship and the fears of confinement and loneliness driving one mad serve to anchor the story in the real world. The lyrical language; the mystery surrounding Faina’s origins and how she survives alone in the bitter cold; subtle changes to the prose such as the absence of quotation marks around direct speech in the scenes in which Faina appears all create the impression of an enchanted world.
Like all fairy stories, this one can be appreciated at different levels, the reader co-creating her own story (as Mabel does with her copy of the Russian fairytale) in conjunction with the text. What I read was a beautiful tale of love and yearning, and the challenges and risks in attempting to tame the wild things, both in terms of landscape and the creatures that inhabit it.
The Snow Child is a much-deserved Pulitzer Prize finalist. Thanks to Headline Review for providing me with a copy. If you enjoy magical realism, I can highly recommend The Woman Who Had No Shadow by Paula Reed Nancarrow and Ivy Dreams by Teagan Kearney, short stories you can read for free on their blogs.
Based on an actual fairytale, The Snow Child straddles reality and fantasy and, for me, gets the balance just right. The pleasures and strains of a mature marriage; the harshness and beauty of the landscape; the compromises of friendship and the fears of confinement and loneliness driving one mad serve to anchor the story in the real world. The lyrical language; the mystery surrounding Faina’s origins and how she survives alone in the bitter cold; subtle changes to the prose such as the absence of quotation marks around direct speech in the scenes in which Faina appears all create the impression of an enchanted world.
Like all fairy stories, this one can be appreciated at different levels, the reader co-creating her own story (as Mabel does with her copy of the Russian fairytale) in conjunction with the text. What I read was a beautiful tale of love and yearning, and the challenges and risks in attempting to tame the wild things, both in terms of landscape and the creatures that inhabit it.
The Snow Child is a much-deserved Pulitzer Prize finalist. Thanks to Headline Review for providing me with a copy. If you enjoy magical realism, I can highly recommend The Woman Who Had No Shadow by Paula Reed Nancarrow and Ivy Dreams by Teagan Kearney, short stories you can read for free on their blogs.
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