FICTION: COMING OF AGE
When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman
At what age do we come of age? And will we even know it when we do?
Eleanor Maude Portman, called Elly, is the heroine of Sarah Winman’s striking debut novel, “When God Was a Rabbit.” The youngest daughter in a scattered but loving working-class English family in the 1970s, she spends her early years dancing with the characters in her ordinary life: A lottery-obsessed father, a teenage brother in love with his mate Charlie, a best friend who’s constantly late for their play dates because she just can’t tame her hair, an elderly neighbor who claims to be a concentration camp survivor.
But Elly’s still neighborhood runs deep, and much of the novel’s early fuel comes from her burgeoning awareness of her community’s darker corners. Was her best friend really wrestling with her hair? Or was she wrestling with her latest stepfather?
Elly’s intense, innocent narration — sometimes transparent, sometimes murky — renders mundane events with drama, calamitous events with comedy. After her grandparents are killed in a bus accident in Austria, the tour guide “said that although it was a tragic accident, they had just eaten so they died happy.”
For Elly, life is a dance between light and darkness, swirling around each other like bickering spouses at a cocktail party: competitive, but co-dependent.
Elly’s three first loves are her brother Joe, her friend Jenny Penny, and a pet rabbit she names God. Her devotion to each is tested mightily — not by betrayal but by circumstance. Winman’s secure tether to the preteen mind reminds us that the effect is the same. When Elly’s family decides to move to Cornwall, Jenny Penny takes it personally. Enraged, she accuses Elly of abandonment, which crushes the young girl’s heart: “I followed her to the back fence, shouting her name, begging her to stop, pleading, but she never did. The shutter had come down.”
The new home in Cornwall becomes a modest bed-and- breakfast, flypaper for a host of eccentric family, friends and relatives, and a source of deep confusion and magical thinking, all of which challenges Elly’s emotional endurance and leaves indelible imprints on her character. Joe’s boyfriend Charlie is kidnapped by radicals in Lebanon, John Lennon is shot, God is run over by a car — Elly acknowledges, absorbs and reflects on it all with crystalline commentary.
Later, as the story moves through the 1990s and eventually to a desperate search for her brother in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11, Elly’s early experiences cast shadows over her complicated, inconsistently fulfilling adult life.
The specifics of what happens to Elly are as tangential to “When God Was a Rabbit” as the paper it’s written on (or the device it’s displayed on). Winman’s most durable tool is her lucid, devastating voice, and she wields it both to sculpt and shatter, often in the same passage: “I wanted us to listen again to the bells of Bartholomew as we ate croissants and read the newspapers and gossiped about people we knew and those we didn’t. Most of all I wanted wellness to seize her again and drop her running into the colorful wake of London life. But Ginger never got to go outside again, and in the end I told her she wasn’t missing much because we had done it all, lived it all, hadn’t we? So there wasn’t much point.”
A peevish undercurrent runs through the novel, a faint whininess that will annoy stiff-upper-lippers. And while Winman’s characters are precise and appealing, she occasionally leans on facile conveniences (Elly’s gay brother sings in a Judy Garland- themed choir) for color.
“When God Was a Rabbit” will carry special significance for Winman’s contemporaries; fellow children of the 1970s will appreciate Elly’s filter on events like Queen Elizabeth’s silver jubilee in 1977, the murder of Gianni Versace in 1997 and the worry over Y2K. But Winman’s precise and detailed portrait of an inner life growing not out of itself, but into itself — illuminating the continuum between the child’s mind and the grown-up’s — will cross generations.
Tucker Shaw: 303-954-1958 or tshaw@denverpost.com
