1976: Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children and listening to her mother's grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change.
Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions for the end which is surely coming soon, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote European forest. There he tells Peggy the rest of the world has disappeared.
Her life is reduced to a piano which makes music but no sound, a forest where all that grows is a means of survival, and a tiny wooden hut that is Everything.
***
Kids. They'll believe almost anything if the "truth" comes from someone they trust.
And why wouldn't they? The world is wide and full of wonders we expect our children to accept without question. In that sense, the thought that a big ol' bunny rabbit brings them chocolate eggs each Easter isn't much less credulous than the idea that a thing called gravity keeps them from flying into the sky.
But there's a big difference between a little white lie told with the best of intentions and the apocalyptic fiction Peggy Hillcoat's father passes off as a fact at the start of Claire Fuller's disarmingly dark, if indisputably beautiful debut.
A so-called survivalist who has till today remained rooted in relative reality—content to attend meetings with other Retreaters at the same time as stockpiling provisions to see himself, his wife Ute and their darling daughter through the imminent collapse of civilised society—Peggy's papa is pushed over the proverbial edge by a betrayal at the beginning of the book, so when Ute, a prestigious pianist, takes some time away from the family home to tour, her husband takes the opportunity to spirit their eight-year-old off on what he calls a holiday.
Poor, perceptive Peggy sees through this ruse, but what's a girl in the wilderness of the woods to do except forge on forward in her father's footsteps?
Kids. They'll believe almost anything if the "truth" comes from someone they trust.
And why wouldn't they? The world is wide and full of wonders we expect our children to accept without question. In that sense, the thought that a big ol' bunny rabbit brings them chocolate eggs each Easter isn't much less credulous than the idea that a thing called gravity keeps them from flying into the sky.
But there's a big difference between a little white lie told with the best of intentions and the apocalyptic fiction Peggy Hillcoat's father passes off as a fact at the start of Claire Fuller's disarmingly dark, if indisputably beautiful debut.
A so-called survivalist who has till today remained rooted in relative reality—content to attend meetings with other Retreaters at the same time as stockpiling provisions to see himself, his wife Ute and their darling daughter through the imminent collapse of civilised society—Peggy's papa is pushed over the proverbial edge by a betrayal at the beginning of the book, so when Ute, a prestigious pianist, takes some time away from the family home to tour, her husband takes the opportunity to spirit their eight-year-old off on what he calls a holiday.
Poor, perceptive Peggy sees through this ruse, but what's a girl in the wilderness of the woods to do except forge on forward in her father's footsteps?
The holiday my father had promised wasn't a holiday. There were no beaches or sandcastles, no ice creams, no donkey rides; my father said we would rest when we got to die Hütte. The bushes at the sides of the path we walked along were nearly grown together, as if to say, this path is not for humans. My father was having none of it. (p.49)Their destination, die Hütte, is a ramshackle cabin in the forests of rural France where Peggy's papa plans to put down roots. To that end, he tells her that the world beyond the hills on the horizon is gone, along with all the folks unfortunate enough to be on the other side of the Great Divide, including Ute—and innocent as she is, Peggy assumes his tall tale is true.