Lost and found in lonely places
Lavinia Greenlaw
THE RECKONING by Patricia Tyrrell Weidenfeld, £9.99, pp. 218, ISBN 0297848888917 patricia Tyrrell has self-published two novels, both of which were shortlisted for major prizes. The Promised Land was runner-up for the Sagittarius Prize for a first novel by someone over the age of 60, and The Reckoning was a contender for the Encore Award. I am happy to declare an interest here as, along with Mark Amory, the literary editor of these pages, I was one of the Encore judges. The book didn't win, but Tyrrell has gone on gaining admirers, including a major publishing house who have now brought her into mainstream print.
This remarkable novel lifts off from a story of archetypal depth: a stolen child, a murder, a man seeking redemption and a couple whose grief has frozen them over. It is narrated by the teenage Cate, who was abducted from a campsite in the American West when she was three. The man who took her was a drifter called Les, who has brought her up since, apparently successfully. They camp in abandoned shacks and drive into town to pick up food stamps and welfare cheques: there's no school, but no television either. Then Cate does something which determines Les to return her to her mother, not as simple an idea as it might seem. Tyrrell sets aside the two major dramas of the book to concentrate in each case on the aftermath.
In Cate, she has a storyteller who is poised on the brink of the adult world — able to watch and listen, but not yet ready to act. She is brave, gauche, mortified and muddled in true adolescent style. She is also able to trace a pattern of tragic compulsion being acted out by people who are neither bad nor good. They are all, even Cate, a little vain and fearful. Her mother is a vision of blonde and beige, a jeweller who locks Cate in the bedroom in case she might steal and then buys her new clothes to go to Washington for the
blood tests: her father is an academic with a new young lover, who disappears when the tests confirm that Cate is his.
This is a contemporary story with hardly any contemporary detail, because it takes place outside ordinary life. As Cate and Les travel east, we get to see the epic landscape of America through her constrained gaze. Texas is dust, sage and cottongrass, Oklahoma 'squared-off roads', the Mississippi 'a big brown river', Tennessee has mountains but the wrong kind. Cate moves from one kind of isolation to another, from L,es's truck to her mother's designer log cabin in the Virginia woods, and her estrangement reflects the way in which extreme experiences leave us cut off. We first meet her in the desert, where she describes the nearest town as if it were a small mark on a blank page. Her manner of speech is an odd mixture of brutal and quaint — emphatically anything but East Coast and another reflection of America's many separate worlds. The reunion of Cate and her mother is not the end of the story, any more than her abduction was the beginning. Tyrrell's gift is to keep the thing alive and open; she does not contrive meaning or consolation, but brings us a supremely human and intelligent tale.
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