This is the second book by Rosie Garland that I have read and I thoroughly enjoyed both. They would be best described as dark fairy tales.
Vixen is set in South West England in the time of the plague. Frightened people are looking for miracles and their priest, Thomas, is determined to provide them. It looks with an unflinching and critical gaze at the corruption of Catholicism and the rampant misogyny that accompanies the religious doctrine.
When a child is found close to death the priest declares she is sent by God to save them. In his vanity he believes he owns this miracle and his housekeeper Anne and it his right to use and ill-use them as he wishes. The child, known as Vixen and The Maid, is more pagan than Christian and more woman than child, but both escape the priest’s notice.
A quote from near the end of the book sums up the main theme -
“Each leaf is nourishment for the small beasts of the forest, who in turn feed the greater beasts, who in turn feed men. My head swims in contemplation of this marvellous chain of being. Yet men stamp upon them, kick them out of the way as if they are nothing. I wonder if we are not poorer for the loss of a single leaf, each as lovely as the cast-off wing of a brown angel.
I scoop up a heap and toss them into the air. They fall in a damp pattering, full of the aroma of decay that is not dying but the promise of rebirth next spring. I hurl more and more, in an unruly storm. Each leaf is a woman, a million of us, tramped into dirt. We bud, we fruit and, when we can bud no more, we serve no further purpose. After our brief harvest, we are raked into heaps for burning. I see the face of the earth swept clear of our dappled light, our softness. A barren world scraped bare and dry, lacking the thick mulch of our abundance.”
It is a wonderful tale, full of heartache, death, violence and tenderness. Rosie Garland’s prose is poetic and evocative. Why not read it while listening to Rosie’s other great project “The March Violets”?
5/5 stars.