Crime and society
This debut novel is a rich and engaging portrait of a town and its residents, but it is also slow and confusing.
and persists. Towards dawn, when he has passed out, she escapes and makes her way to a homestead. The woman of the house, Mary Rose, who has a young daughter admits her (to the anger of her husband) and when the boy follows, she deters him with her rifle and the matter is reported to the police.
We lose sight of the crime for long passages in the novel, which is told from the point of view of half a dozen other women, but it lurks in the background.
The reception of the story is not surprisingly confused and darkened by racism; there are, for instance, decent church-going women who think how terrible it must be for the boy’s mother to have her son in jail, accused of such a crime – and only, they imply, even when they don’t say – when it is all just a fuss about a Mexican girl and everybody knows what they are like.
There are always problems when a novelist chooses to tell a story through different voices and from different perspectives.
The first is that the narrative will become disjointed and lose its urgency; the second, that some of the characters through whom the story is being revealed will be more interesting than others, so that the reader becomes impatient, anxious to get back to what is surely the heart of the matter.
All this is hard to avoid when you are trying and, in Wetmore’s case for the most past succeeding, to enrich and enlarge the narrative in order to present us with a picture and analysis of a whole society.
Wetmore doesn’t quite avoid these traps. There are passages which may have even the most sympathetic or indulgent reader wishing to return to another more interesting and engaging character.
Nevertheless, there is much to admire and enjoy in this novel. There is a fine sense of place, an understanding of hardship and its corrosive effect on character, a recognition and realisation of the courage with which so many of the women meet adversity – even, somewhat surprisingly, an understanding that the often unsympathetic response of their men and their failure to understand are themselves a response to the harsh demands of their working life and the failures they experience. This is life endured most of the time on the edge in
a desert landscape under a burning sun. There is also a recognition of the strength given by the habit of understatement in an unforgiving world. “You might surprise yourself,” a husband near death says, “after I’m gone.” “I doubt that very seriously,” his wife replies. The same woman, when bereaved , says flatly that she doesn’t care for any company. This, like much in the novel, rings true.
This is a novel that gives the impression of having been lived with for a long time – too long perhaps. There is extravagance here. Wetmore’s second novel will be interesting. hymn to the glorious adaptability of life on earth.
Always, the argument is threaded through with delicious descriptions of the natural world and its endless mobility. And although Shah’s arguments may not be watertight, her luminous love for this changing world is surely a far better guide, as we face an uncertain future, than the dreary fear-mongering and lies of those she condemns, sometimes without much elegance, but always with a rich measure of gaiety, humour, and hope.