BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, Fourth Estate, £16.99 9/10

The Book of Goose begins with Agnes receiving a letter from her mother with news that her childhood best-friend Fabienne has died in childbirth.

Now living in Philidephia, with new distance both physical and emotional, Agnes reflects on her upbringing in a small farming community in post-war France, and how the elaborate fantasies that Fabienne had weaved for the two of them to escape their mundane rural lives, led Agnes to leave behind her community and, most importantly, Fabienne.

As children, Agnes and Fabienne are inseparable, isolating themselves from their peers. They are only apart when Agnes is at school – Fabienne must stay home since the death of her mother, herding goats and keeping house for her father and brothers.

Undoubtedly, Fabienne is the leader, and Agnes her devoted follower, “It did not matter at all that I could not catch up with her. I lived through her. What was left behind was only my shell”. One day, while lying in their usual spot in a graveyard and bored of their usual pretend games, Fabienne decides she and Agnès will write a book. Fabienne has a gift for storytelling and can dictate the plot, but she needs Agnes and her penmanship skills to write it down. Unsure, but ever trusting of Fabienne, Agnes goes along with the scheme, even when the stories that Fabienne conceives are violent and disturbed.

Fabienne enlists the services of the neighbouring, recently widowed postmaster who, realising there may be some value in these stories beyond twisted children’s imaginations, passes the stories to a Parisian publisher, which begins a series of events, catapulting Agnes into a new world of recognition and forcing an uneasy distance between the girls.

Author Yiyun Li writes beautifully buttery prose that precisely captures Agnes’s anxious focus on pleasing Fabienne, while never failing to flesh out every other character in her world. As well as the dynamic between the girls, Li explores the responsibility placed on children to act like adults and live the lives expected of them. Parents are largely absent in this novel, throughout there is a sense that soon Fabienne and Agnes themselves will be absent, Fabienne asks Agnes: “Can’t you see we’ve already lived past the best time of our lives?”

Of course, Li does not write the children simply as victims, and as much as they are exploited by selfserving adults, they exploit back, sometimes cruelly.

Another literary triumph from Li.