I recently featured four novels depicting the impact on children of a father’s absence. These two debut novels present the other side of the story: the terrible harm that a father’s presence can do. In both, the fathers control their children’s minds and bodies through violence and a perverted kind of love. Although fiction, each reflects the darker side of society today.
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Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed
The descendants of the island’s ten founding fathers live in theoretically godly and peaceful harmony, free of the scourge of the “wastelands” without electricity, modern medicine or any of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Supposedly self-sufficient, nevertheless the elite “wanderers” visit the mainland intermittently to bring back wood, paper, sheep and the occasional new recruits to the community. At school, children are bored by their lessons in tanning leather and the properties of metals they will never see, awaiting the summer when they’ll run wild. For when the rains come the adults and babies stay indoors to avoid the mosquitoes, while the children protect their skin with a layer of mud and spend weeks of days and nights outside. At least that’s how it is for the girls until their “summer of fruition”, the first summer after their menarche, when, in a cross between an orgy and speed dating, they must marry.
Vanessa, daughter of a wanderer with a love of books, relishes her relative privilege, but the glimpses of other worlds in her father’s library isn’t enough to free her mind from the lies she’s imbibed since infancy. If rebellion is to come it will be through Janey, at seventeen older than most new mothers, who has managed to delay puberty by a regime of self-starvation. But can the girls hold out against the power of their fathers? Is the suspicion that all is not as it seems enough to point the way out?
With multiple characters and a necessary world-building, it took me a little time to fully appreciate this novel’s merits. But from midway I was hooked and full of admiration for the author’s plotting and prose. I particularly liked the understated manner in which the reader is appraised of the more horrific aspects of the culture: fathers penetrating their prepubescent daughters (because of course they must fuck someone and with a need to control the population in the absence of birth control they stop doing it with their wives after the regulation two children); the public “shaming” for misdeeds turning into a vicious lashing.
While obviously about misogyny, what struck me most was its illustration of the difference between education and schooling, and how religion controls not only what we do that what we are able to think. With echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale in its convincing portrait of a misogynist theocracy (are there any other kinds of theocracy, I wonder?), The Lord of the Flies in the gangs of over disciplined children going feral and A Song for Issy Bradley in its exploration of indoctrination stunting adolescent minds, Gather the Daughters is an impressive debut and timely reminder of the continuing need to draw attention to the subjugation of women by the patriarchy. Thanks to Tinder Press for my review copy.
Vanessa, daughter of a wanderer with a love of books, relishes her relative privilege, but the glimpses of other worlds in her father’s library isn’t enough to free her mind from the lies she’s imbibed since infancy. If rebellion is to come it will be through Janey, at seventeen older than most new mothers, who has managed to delay puberty by a regime of self-starvation. But can the girls hold out against the power of their fathers? Is the suspicion that all is not as it seems enough to point the way out?
With multiple characters and a necessary world-building, it took me a little time to fully appreciate this novel’s merits. But from midway I was hooked and full of admiration for the author’s plotting and prose. I particularly liked the understated manner in which the reader is appraised of the more horrific aspects of the culture: fathers penetrating their prepubescent daughters (because of course they must fuck someone and with a need to control the population in the absence of birth control they stop doing it with their wives after the regulation two children); the public “shaming” for misdeeds turning into a vicious lashing.
While obviously about misogyny, what struck me most was its illustration of the difference between education and schooling, and how religion controls not only what we do that what we are able to think. With echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale in its convincing portrait of a misogynist theocracy (are there any other kinds of theocracy, I wonder?), The Lord of the Flies in the gangs of over disciplined children going feral and A Song for Issy Bradley in its exploration of indoctrination stunting adolescent minds, Gather the Daughters is an impressive debut and timely reminder of the continuing need to draw attention to the subjugation of women by the patriarchy. Thanks to Tinder Press for my review copy.
One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel
This father so loves his two boys. He loves them so much he drives through the night to give them a new start in Albuquerque, having first got the younger one, the narrator of Daniel Magariel’s debut novel, to punch himself in the face so they can take photographs to show the child protection services he’s not safe with his mother back in Kansas. He loves them so much he pits one boy against the other and, although barely in their teens, trusts them to look after themselves while he locks his bedroom door to binge on crack cocaine. What makes this sad situation sadder is that his confused sons love him back.
I don’t often picture the characters of the book I’m reading but halfway through this short novel, which I read in an evening, I recognised the man-child in my mind as the current father figure of the USA. The unpredictability. The mood swings. The misogyny. The threat of violence and the absence of filter between mind and mouth. And the people love him. Need I say more?
Will the boys recognise the harm he is doing in time to escape? Is there anywhere to run to when they don’t trust the authorities and their mother isn’t a whole lot better? While I’d have appreciated more fleshed-out characterisation and subplot, the concentration on the father-son relationships means there’s no escaping the pain of their predicament. Sadly, this is the reality for some children: growing up loving and admiring their abuser even when they fear him, because there is no-one else. A disturbing story for disturbing times, and a much bleaker perspective on masculinity than the one Stephen May gives us in Stronger Than Skin. Thanks to Granta Books for my review copy.
I don’t often picture the characters of the book I’m reading but halfway through this short novel, which I read in an evening, I recognised the man-child in my mind as the current father figure of the USA. The unpredictability. The mood swings. The misogyny. The threat of violence and the absence of filter between mind and mouth. And the people love him. Need I say more?
Will the boys recognise the harm he is doing in time to escape? Is there anywhere to run to when they don’t trust the authorities and their mother isn’t a whole lot better? While I’d have appreciated more fleshed-out characterisation and subplot, the concentration on the father-son relationships means there’s no escaping the pain of their predicament. Sadly, this is the reality for some children: growing up loving and admiring their abuser even when they fear him, because there is no-one else. A disturbing story for disturbing times, and a much bleaker perspective on masculinity than the one Stephen May gives us in Stronger Than Skin. Thanks to Granta Books for my review copy.
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