‘1968… The year Paris took to the streets. The year of the Tet offensive. The year Martin Luther King lost his life for
a dream.’ The year too, that Elly Portman
was born.
I can remember exactly where I was when the Twin Towers were
attacked, and I bet you can too. I can
picture the Brixton riots. I remember
what I was doing when Elvis Presley died (and I remember John Craven telling me
about it). And I know, for the rest of
my life, I will recall exactly how it felt to watch the 2013 Boston Marathon.
If we’re lucky, we witness these events from a
distance. They are markers in a broader
pattern of life, ones that don’t affect us directly but by which we feel the
interruption of our personal story by something far bigger. If we’re unlucky, they are life-changing.
So it is with Elly in Sarah Winman’s When God was a Rabbit. Elly
is the daughter of a chaotic, unusual family.
‘It often occurred to me that normal people never stayed with us’, she explains, ‘or if they did it was
certainly for no longer than the one eye-opening night… Our lives had become
tidal; friendships, money, business, love; nothing ever stayed the same.’
Into this colourful environment appear a cast of
idiosyncratic characters. There is
Arthur, the wise eccentric who knows that he’ll be killed by a falling coconut,
Ginger, a red-haired larger than life Shirley Bassey impersonator, and Nancy
the lesbian actress. Most of all though,
there is Elly’s brother Joe with whom she shares a dark secret. There is Joe, and a rabbit called god.
Often in fiction, when real-life events appear it can feel
intrusive. In Winman’s narrative
however, they are a series of markers on which emotions and experiences snag. Lives flow in a series of intuitions,
apparent distractions and leaps, and people drift together and apart as their
experiences bob under the surface and re-emerge revealing unexpected relevance.
If this all sounds a bit abstract, it is also hilariously
told. Winman deals with sexual abuse,
domestic violence, murder, suicide and abduction, but this is never a
depressing or aggressive book. If
anything, its gentleness and humour makes these events jar starkly when they
occur – and this works well.
The central – and unexpected – marker is the 2001 attack on the
Twin Towers. Until this point, the
occasional reminders that something will bob up again meaningfully later grates slightly, but here the strands pull together. It’s as if there is a ‘before’ and ‘after’,
with life starting afresh on a new footing.
The re-referencing of what seem to be separate events now give meaning
and coherence and help bring the story full circle. Perhaps life isn’t meaningless. Perhaps there really is a pattern.
But what perhaps struck me most forcefully after the last
week is that the real markers in life are not just the big events that shock
us. It’s the people we love, and who
love us back, and this book makes that point beautifully.
As Elly tells Joe, “You see, that’s who you are Joe… That’s
the person I know, and through him is the way you’ll know me, because connected
to all these things are moments, and
for so many of them, I was there...” This
is a moving and unusual love story that reminds us that love can be found in
unexpected places and small gestures, and in spite of everything, life is
indescribably good.
