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Featherstone (2002)

by Kirsty Gunn

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681385,699 (2.96)None
Featherstone: an attractive, small rural town serving outlying estates, bank, post office, school... At first glance, Kirsty Gunn's small country town is like any other - a closely connected community bound by habit and familiarity. Yet as we're invited to spend the weekend in Featherstone we come to realise there's something more to this place that unsettles us, something intense and intimate that goes deep into the lives of the people who live here and bares open their hearts... Featherstone is a novel about memory and need, forgetting and faith, a story of people - of their hopes and faiths and disappointments, of desire and the way desire can go rotten inside - but above all it offers an insight to the ways in which all of us deceive and believe in one another, in how we love.… (more)
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I’ve read a few complaints from readers who thought Gunn was too in love with her own voice at the expense of plot, but I’m not preoccupied with plot and Gunn really does have a lovely voice. And just because she’s not telling a terribly eventful story doesn’t mean she has nothing to say, either.

On the contrary, Featherstone has its own preoccupations other than plot. One of them is light. Gunn makes me think of a painter doing studies of the same place at different times, in different lights. The sun and time of day are important here.

"He looked, with his hands at his forehead that way against the light, and he thought he did know her, though the light was bright on her, and around her bright, and at her back, like foil. It was late, late afternoon."

Amusingly, we hear just then that “[t]he sun, however, that was a thing he hadn’t noticed before.” But we’ll notice it over and over, its color changing over the course of the day, the light fading and coming and going and dappling, and never really reaching down into the Reserve, the cool shady place by the river where Ray Weldon likes to go and think of his long-lost love.

Our omniscient third-person narrator has access to the inner lives of each villager in turn, and while we’re with someone we get a bit of stream of consciousness mixed in with the beautiful exposition. This builds up impressionistic pictures of the psychology of each character, something I found very effective and well done. It’s so hard for me to even understand the psychology of so many novels, let alone feel with the characters, but here I was really affected by at least some, especially Sonny and Ray.

Ray’s long-lost love is also Sonny’s long-lost niece, and they are deeply connected through this woman, Francie, who left Featherstone years before never to return. Loss, and longing, and not being able to hold onto someone no matter how hard you grab her, are great problems in the novel. And Kirsty Gunn is good enough to know that one of the things you can’t hold onto, nail down, keep in one place, is longing itself, and emotion. Whenever we hear about Sonny’s or Ray’s relationship with Francie the memories and thoughts are enchanting but, like Francie, so, so slippery. And so hard to communicate, to themselves and each other. Sonny wants badly to share with Ray what he’s learned by the end of the novel.
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Sonny has just explained to his friend Johnny Carmichael that “I’ve been deep in my thoughts…I’m sorry, but they’re all around us here.” He has a hard time coming up for air, which is just the effect the book had on me as well.

(more at http://www.bibliographing.com/2009/06/01/featherstone-trodden-sodden-earth-river... ) ( )
  nperrin | Jul 2, 2009 |
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Featherstone: an attractive, small rural town serving outlying estates, bank, post office, school... At first glance, Kirsty Gunn's small country town is like any other - a closely connected community bound by habit and familiarity. Yet as we're invited to spend the weekend in Featherstone we come to realise there's something more to this place that unsettles us, something intense and intimate that goes deep into the lives of the people who live here and bares open their hearts... Featherstone is a novel about memory and need, forgetting and faith, a story of people - of their hopes and faiths and disappointments, of desire and the way desire can go rotten inside - but above all it offers an insight to the ways in which all of us deceive and believe in one another, in how we love.

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