![]() ![]() The connection with colonialism is obvious, and the slight, elfin “first folk” seen flitting through the forest are explicit stand-ins for Native Americans. There is almost a zany Alice in Wonderland quality to the plot’s recursive cul de sacs There are no innocents in Hunt’s fiction: to walk the earth is to be complicit. ![]() There is no daylight haven on the other side of the trees: “There was nowhere on this world or off it where we could be safe, even for a minute.” We carry the darkness within us and one of the many mysteries teasingly revealed over the course of the novel is Goody’s own part in the world’s savagery. As events in the forest become ever more frightening and surreal, an equal monstrousness attaches itself to memories of her everyday life: the husband who punishes her, the cruel colossus of a mother who beat her father. Eliza calls her Goody it’s a name that promises domestic obedience, but it doesn’t sit well with her. “She will miss it terribly but it is mine now.” The narrator’s new friends display an unsettling combination of menace and sisterly solidarity. So we are also in a hall of mirrors, where roles and identities can be put on and off, like the wolf cloak Captain Jane has stolen from Granny Someone. It’s there she learns about the game of Change About: “It was such fun, said Eliza, to be first the little girl getting herself eaten, then the wolf doing the eating, then the hunter the killing … ” There’s swashbuckling Captain Jane, who professes to help those lost in the forest Granny Someone, whose powers are waning and enigmatic Eliza, to whose inviting cottage our heroine finds herself constantly returning. She wanders, of course, from the path, and into the orbit of three other women, who might be companions, or witches, or versions of herself. “It was a great wide new world we had come to after we had left our troubles behind.”Īnd we are deep in the dark of the woods, along with the narrator, who ventures in hunting for berries as a treat for “my boy and my man”. Crumbs of information dropped throughout the text suggest that we are in colonial-era Puritan New England, where a woman has settled with her husband and son. “O nce upon a time there was and there wasn’t a woman who went to the woods … ” US author Laird Hunt’s riddling, shapeshifting novel makes full use of the fertile ambiguity of fairytale: its wide-eyed rhetorical certainty and resistance to final interpretation. ![]()
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