The Forrests

Emily Perkins

Bloomsbury

Otago Daily Times, March 26th 2012

In a recent review I expressed my dissatisfaction with Mark Haddon’s The Red House , a response sharpened by the fact that it compared badly with Emily Perkins’ much anticipated new work, The Forrests.  A similarly immersive narrative, it spans not the events of a week but of a lifetime as experienced by sisters Elaine and Dorothy Forrest.

Told in a series of episodic chapters, it carries us from their childhood in the 1960s and 70s to Dorothy’s final days in a rest home some time in the near future.  Just as our own memories are often dominated by the overwhelming impression of the smallest thing, the moments we remember most vividly often appear random and arbitrary. So too do the scenes Perkins shares with us. Seemingly trivial and disconnected, they are described with an intense sensuality and attention to detail that immerse the reader in events as experienced by her characters, even if their significance is not always obvious from the outside.  The following passage is from early in the novel, and takes place in an alpine cottage Evelyn is sharing with a German family:

The woman nodded and took Evelyn’s finger in her own.  Her nails were short, without varnish.  She pushed at the sides of the finger pad and a micrometre more of the black wood emerged, emphatic as a speck of dirt.  The pointed ends of the tweezers delicately gripped the splinter and the woman drew it towards her and out of Evelyn’s body, and held it up to the light.  A dot of blood emerged from the skin where the splinter had been. The mother passed the tweezers back, the splinter still stuck to one arm.  Evelyn took the finger out of her mouth and said, ‘Thanks’, her tongue tasting a little of the blood and the resiny firewood.  In the bathroom she wiped the splinter off into a tissue in the rubbish bag that hung on a hook on the bathroom door, its contents – wilted tissues like flowers, flattened toilet rolls – visible innards through the transparent plastic.  Far off in the mountains behind the hut there was a crack.  The sound registered through the back of her head like the soft pop of a neighbour’s firework; a long second later she understood what it was.

And here it ends.  No explanation, nothing that is ever referred to again, but for these few short paragraphs we enter Evelyn’s world.

The earliest sections of the book describe a summer the Forrest children and their friend Daniel spent on a wimmin’s commune somewhere in Northland, then proceeds to dip in and out of Dorothy and Evelyn’s lives as they grow up and have children of their own. The point of view initially alternates between the sisters before focusing on Dorothy as she moves through motherhood and into old age, a transition in which the one constant is her love for Daniel, a figure who remains as central to her life in his absence as his presence.

In this sense the novel captures both the impermanence of the world and the way that the relationships we form can provide a sense of continuity as important to our identity as our physical selves. But it is also an intensely personal portrait of a specific life and character, with a complexity that develops and deepens over time. My favourite scene follows the elderly Dorothy she as tries to negotiate her way in an unfamiliar store in search of baking powder; her loneliness, frailty and a hint of senility are undercut by her successfully facing down the manager when caught shoplifting a packet of biscuits (an activity that explains why she has avoided her local dairy in the first place).

The Forrests opens with the children’s father filming a home movie, and this is exactly what it reminded me of; a series of frames which individually capture mere moments in time, but combine to capture the essence of a life. Although some people may be frustrated by the style, I found it immensely compelling and satisfying, a novel to be experienced as much as read. It is already being spoken of as a contender for the Mann-Booker prize, and can certainly hold its own against many previous winners in both its originality and its achievement. 

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/novels-create-feeling-reader-voyeur