Anna

Niccolò Ammaniti

Text Publishing

Otago Daily Times, October 9th 2017

Now I am a mother, my imagination needs no help in conjuring up fears for the future my children will face. So it was with trepidation that I picked up Niccolò Ammaniti’s latest novel (which falls somewhere betweenThe Road and Lord of the Flies), only to find myself inextricably hooked.

The book is set in Sicily in 2020, four years after a virus called Red Fever has swept around the world, killing the adult population and leaving their children to fend for themselves. And theirs will be humanity’s final generation for the latent infection becomes active at adolescence and these last survivors will never reach maturity.

The story centres around thirteen-year-old Anna and nine-year-old Astor Zanchetti. Before her death, Anna’s mother wrote down everything her daughter needed to know to survive in an Important Book and for four years the pair have lived alone and undisturbed, surviving with what Anna can scavenge from the nearby village. Then she arrives home to find her brother gone and she embarks on a desperate search to find him.

With the help of Paolo, a newcomer to the village who befriends her just before Astor’s disappearance, Anna tracks her brother to mountain-top hotel full of dying children who believe houses a mythical Grown-up who will cure them. Shocked by what she has seen and dismayed by Astor’s initial reluctance to leave his new companions, Anna is forced to face the fact that things cannot go back to the way they used to be, and they set off for the mainland with Paolo in the hope of finding a somebody to take care of Astor before they too die.

Stark and confronting, the writing seethes with images of desperation, violence and death. Towns are decaying and most of the people they encounter have reverted to a more primitive way of being, from peri-adolescents that enslave younger children and force them to construct a massive marionette from human bones to a gang of six and seven-year-olds that have reverted to a nearly pre-verbal hunter-gatherer state.

Even Astor, whom Anna has spent years teaching to write, is losing this knowledge, and will never read the Important Book. Yet despite the loss and chaos that surround her Anna refuses to give in to despair, recognising that “life is stronger than everything else…we must go on…struggling against that whirlpool that sucks us down.”

She lovingly decorates her mother’s skeleton with jewellery and a black felt-tip pen, gives the wild dog that befriends them the incongruous name of Fluffy, and dares to fall in love with Paolo like any ‘normal’ teenager might. Determined to protect Astor above all else, her resolve and spirit are a life-affirming glimmer of light in the darkness and, as much as it haunted me, I could not put the book down.

At five and nine, my daughters are the same age as Astor and Anna at their mother’s death. Even though the ambiguous ending leaves open the possibility of survival, it tears my heart out to think of them facing such horrors without me to defend them.

Anna is an unforgettable read, but my parental guidance is to read it AFTER your children are grown!

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/hard-pick-impossible-put-down