Reading room: the best reads this month
What extremes would you go to protect a child in danger is the question posed in this gripping novel, says Juliet Rieden.
There’s something raw and compulsive about Sarah Armstrong’s new novel Promise – even the bald title feels like a cry for help that turns into a pact. The urgent descriptions pull you in from the outset as protagonist Anna tries to grapple with the horrors going on in front of her eyes. Anna, a not very ambitious graphic designer, lives on her own in a tumbledown rented house; her main pleasure is her garden. Following the death of her neighbour, new tenants arrive. Gabby and wan five-year-old daughter Charlie are a rag-tag pair. Gabby seems out of it and Charlie hungry and desperately unkempt. When Gabby’s partner, Harlan, turns up, all menace and anger, Anna knows that Charlie is in danger. The girl has suspicious injuries – bruises and a human bite mark on her limbs – and just two days after they arrive, Anna and boyfriend Dave find themselves calling the authorities when Harlan’s rage explodes and Charlie is trapped in the firing line.
More incidents compound, but neither the police nor the Department of Family and Community Services seems to be able to remove Charlie from the abuse. Anna is her only hope and she is pleading for help. Facing threats from Harlan, 37-year-old Anna bundles Charlie in her car and drives off, her only plan to get the child to safety. It’s a rash move as Anna goes on the run with Charlie, having abducted her, and it is this moral dilemma at the beating heart of the story that is so gripping and so real.
Sarah says she was inspired to write the novel after seeing media reports about a two-yearold boy who died, his mother charged with his murder.
“Neighbours told how they’d been concerned about him and had reported him to community services several times. I put myself in the shoes of those neighbours; they’d done their best to get him to the attention of authorities, yet the boy died. I imagined that if I were them, I’d feel frustrated and helpless, and might have wished that I’d just picked him up one day and put him in my car and driven away. I think the reason the story captured my attention was because since my daughter was born in 2010, I developed a heightened awareness of the vulnerability of children. I’d lie awake and think about the fact that inevitably, certainly, there were small children in my town being abused. And I felt a terrible helplessness to think that. So creating a character who takes decisive action was perhaps a way for me to have a conversation with myself – and then, once published, with others – about how far our responsibility for other children extends.”
It’s a powerful plot pitching vigilantism against individual responsibility. It takes us on an edge-of-the-seat ride to see if Anna can save Charlie and also herself. The result is thought-provoking and very readable.