Scissors Paper Stone by Elizabeth Day
Bloomsbury $39.99
Despite the glowing book-jacket recommendations from writers much loftier than me, I started out disliking Elizabeth Day's début novel, Scissors Paper Stone. The words and metaphors Day chooses in the first few chapters are so doom-filled and gloomy you can tell this is a tale of misery before you even hit the plot.
Child abuse, it turns out. For example: "Anne loved her daughter so much it felt like a glass splinter lodged deep in her heart." And "she picks at the stitches of each day with a relentlessness that leaves the seams frayed and the material pulled out of shape."
But the author's ability to recognise a good story, then tell it with pace and tension, saves the day. Despite the language, Scissors Paper Stone rips along convincingly, telling the story of an archetypal uptight English family creating its own private hell.
The ringleader is Charles, husband and father of the other two.
Charles is knocked off his bike and sustains life-threatening head injuries. And along come the portents of doom and the questions. Why doesn't his wife, Anne, rush to the hospital? Why does their daughter, Charlotte, also fail to rush to his bedside? And why, a page or so later, do we learn she was horrified when her mother gives her one of her most precious possessions, her diamond and ruby engagement ring?
Skilfully switching back and forward between real time and the past, starting with Anne as a beautiful, carefree young girl, and with a gradual lightening of her language, Day reveals the horrible truth behind this ostensibly ordinary family.
At this point Day's brilliance as a writer starts delivering a real punch. Her metaphors hit the right spot. She describes the moment when the young couple try to fit into a typical London suburb: "In fact they were like flies trapped in honey, sliding into the sticky morass of suburban normality."
There are also some sensitively written scenes that help us understand how people gradually change: how they let their personal beliefs and morals slide. There's the first time Anne decides to ignore Charles' philandering, by saying nothing, turning away, shutting herself off. And on the story weaves, slowly revealing Charles' growing cruelty and depravity and his wife's inexorable shut-down. Until finally she turns into the repressed, critical, angry housewife we meet on page one.
Day makes an impressive job of showing her readers, little by little, how people can be manipulated, distorted - and finally broken. And how everyone involved in this domestic tragedy is a victim, obviously Anne and Charlotte, but surprisingly, for me, Charles too.
Scissors Paper Stone is not an easy novel, but it is thoroughly believable.
Carroll du Chateau is an Auckland reviewer.
