Boy Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being the last stop on the bus route she took from New York. Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman—craftsman, widower, and father of Snow.
Snow is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply cherished—exactly the sort of little girl Boy never was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s simply a characteristic she shares with her father, harmless until Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister, Bird.
When Bird is born, Boy is forced to re-evaluate the image Arturo’s family have presented to her, and Boy, Snow and Bird are broken apart.
***
As Granta magazine allowed last
year, Helen Oyeyemi is unquestionably one of the best young British novelists
in the business, and though her fiction is largely literary, she’s ever evidenced
an interest in speculative elements. From the haunted house in White is for Witching to the magical
realism of Mr Fox, Oyeyemi has incorporated
her fascination with the fantastic into every novel to bear her name to date—up
to and including her new book, Boy, Snow,
Bird. Here, however, the uncanny is arrived at through character rather
than narrative.
Boy, to begin with, is not your
average protagonist. First things first: she’s a girl, born and raised in the
Big Apple by her papa—or the rat catcher, as Boy calls him. He has “the
cleanest hands you’ll ever see in your life. He’ll punch you in the kidneys,
from behind, or he’ll thump the back of your head and walk away sniggering
while you crawl around on the floor, stunned.” (p.6) Boy does her best to
suffer the rat catcher’s casual violence in silence, but in time the usual abuse
takes on a distressing tenor.
The unpredictability of his fist didn’t
mean he was crazy. Far from it. Sometimes he got awfully drunk, but never to a
point where he didn’t seem to know what he was doing. He was trying to train
me. To do what, I don’t know. I never found out, because I ran away almost as
soon as I turned twenty. (p.8)
The folks of Flax Hill,
Massachusetts don’t go out of their way to welcome our girl into their tiny town,
but Boy is undeterred by the cold shoulder they show her:
I found it easy to disregard the
suggestion that I didn’t belong in Flax Hill. The town woke something like a
genetic memory in me... after a couple of weeks, the air tasted right. To be
more specific, the town took on a strong flavour of palinka, that fiery liquor I used to sneak capfuls of whenever the
rat catcher forgot to keep it under lock and key. But now, here, clear smoke
rose from my soul every time I breathed in. A taste of the old country. Of
course I knew better than to mention this to anybody. (pp.23-24)
Little by little, Boy wins the
locals over. She makes a forever friend in Mia, the resident reporter, through
whom she’s introduced to Arturo: a wayward widower with a gorgeous daughter.
Snow is “an extraordinary-looking kid. A medieval swan maiden, only with the
darkest hair and the pinkest lips, every shade at its utmost. She was like a
girl in a Technicolour tapestry,” (p.78) and though Boy eventually develop feelings
for her father, she falls for the girl first.
