GIRL A  Abigail Dean  HARPER COLLINS 2021 PAGES: 328   ₹ 399

When Oscar Wilde said that the one charm about the past is that it is past (through the ready witticism of the neo-Hedonistic Lord Henry Wotton) he was referring to women who clung on even “when the curtain has fallen” – and not to the past per se which clings, creeping into the present, preordaining the future. Jawaharlal Nehru, on the other hand, (Discovery of India) was wont to observe that “…the past is ever with us and all that we are and that we have comes from the past. We are its products and we live immersed in it.… To combine it with the present and extend it to the future, to break from it where it cannot be so united, to make of all this the pulsating and vibrating material for thought and action – that is life.” In a less dramatic way, “Girl A” is about life as it is lived after a severe, traumatic, psychologically damaged past.

That “Life” is what Alexandra Gracie (Girl A / Lex) and her siblings (there are Boys A to D and Girls A to C) try to understand as they recall their chained, starved, humiliated and sexually abused childhood. And yet, the novel does not concentrate on those terrible years: it is more about “life” as it is required to be lived after all that; more about the attempt to “break from [the past] where it cannot be united”. It is also a story of children who manage to escape or be rescued physically from that extreme trauma but cannot really escape from the “past”.

The narrative flits from the past to the present, from conversations professional and deeply psychological, and from fruitless attempts (among the siblings) to reach out to one another and the need to build a façade of being ok-in-the-present-despite-the-past. That past. There’s Lex who after adoption by an ex-policeman, has become a successful lawyer in New York; one of the siblings died before the escape, one died soon after; one cashes in on his past through articles about the horrors, while another is exploited by his adoptive parents for his story and his repeated “murderous rages”. Each chapter, as it focuses on each of the siblings, draws out their individual development (or lack of it), their unique ways of coping – as much as their relationships with the other siblings. The jumping between various time-slots is irritating in the beginning but it tends to keep the reader alert to the various events in the present and in the past – and then you realise, only at the end, the it is but a portrayal of an apparent “attention deficiency” on the part of the protagonist.

The book starts with the family posing for a photograph when one of the siblings looks up and Lex begins to smile: “we paid for it later” she says, setting the tone for all that follows.

What follows is the death of their mother in prison around 15 years later (note the jump in the time-slot) and the appointment of Lex as the executor of her will. The “House of Horrors” is bequeathed to the siblings, along with ₤ 20,000. In a show of being normal and logical and down-to-earth, Lex intends to get her siblings to convert the property into a kind of Community Centre for children and art. To achieve this, she has to meet each sibling, which she does with the wariness of cat walking through the dark undergrowth of their past, and their ill-kept secrets. The process, understandably, is bleak but you keep reading it to discover what kept them going, what prompted them towards the life they are living now, how much better (if at all) was the life with the adoptive parents … how the past remains with them in one form or another, for one reason or another.

I would not describe it as an unputdownable sort of novel. The constant change of scene and the number of characters that keep popping up does make it tedious and you need to take a break now and then. It’s a story plainly told, a serious psychological delving, without rousing much emotion about what happened back then. The present-day narration relates to the times long past in a kind of dread, a fear of opening something you won’t be able to close. The strewing of emotions as the story unfolds in all of your making, of how much you can take and digest … and still read on. Once you get into it, it is compelling reading. Lex goes on with her tale of talking to her siblings, showing her apparently balanced mental condition – until the revelation of terrible imbalance within throws you over – and keep you “thrown” for quite a long time after you’ve read the last line of the book.

The other book that kept running through my mind while reading ““Girl A”” was “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead, (published by Hachette in 2019) which I had reviewed earlier and published on writersark.com on 04.10.2020, titled “A School of Horror”. Having said that the book is not for the fainthearted, I had mentioned that it was based on The Arthur G Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida (a reformatory) which was shut down in 2011 for its excesses: with its “training” for conversion of delinquents into “honourable and honest men” … and the secret graveyard; and a “White House” where laws were made and implemented through steel-reinforced leather whips – the welts went beyond the skin.

“Girl A” is apparently based on the 2018 case of the Turpin family in California where 13 children were kept in conditions similar to the Gracie household. Abigail Dean, obviously moved by this and other stories, says (in an interview) that she was drawn to the “power of teenage girls to escape and be incredibly strong”. And yet, it bears repetition, the book is not about the terrible times back home, but of the resilience and strength shown by the siblings in living a life different from what they had emerged, while retaining all the scars and blemishes of that time.

Some interesting questions do arise: when a sibling group comes out of an abusive situation, do they tend to remain together in a kind of bonding – macabre as it may sound? In the present case, besides the fact that these children were adopted by different families, there is a kind of secretiveness among them, a sad sort of one-upmanship. And the sadness grows when you find that the competitiveness is just a cover for the deep scars that each one carries but would not like the others to know about.

Towards the end of the novel, Ethan invites all his siblings to his wedding. Lex’s adoptive father earnestly advises her not to go. By this time, the reader is so involved that you add to his pleas: Don’t go! These meetings are doing you no good. But she goes. There is hope throughout the narrative, that Lex, at least, would be “fixed”, that she would return to her life in New York as a “normal” person. In fact, her easy and loving relationship with her adoptive father feeds that hope. But Abigail Dean leaves that hunger unsatisfied…. The reader is disappointed while crying: what a beautiful story!

ASIDE:

While reading the book I was reminded of Macbeth's arrogant yet earnest demand of the doctor to cure Lady Macbeth of her illness: the after-effects of having murdered Duncan... where she feared that the "damned spot" of Duncan's blood on her palm would never be washed away, but would rather “incarnadine” all of Neptune's oceans in the washing.

See Act 5 Scene 3:

MACBETH: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

DOCTOR:… … Therein the patient

Must minister to himself.

MACBETH: ... ... ... If thou couldst, doctor, cast

The water of my land, find her disease,

And purge it to a sound and pristine health,

I would applaud thee to the very echo,

That should applaud again.