BUTTERFLY

Sonya Hartnett

Hamish Hamilton, Paperback, 224pp., ISBN 978-0-241-14446-6. Price: £12.99

I.E.Sawmill

Mother was right: judging a book by its cover is wrong. It is an indiscretion. It is as unjust as it is lazy and no doubt indicates that the reader’s only requirement of their bookshelf is visual gratification. Think what they would miss out on! They would never touch The Great Gatsby, for example, just because they have only seen the Penguin 1974 edition and harbour a childhood aversion to Robert Redford’s big smug face.

It is perhaps a lesser sin of reading, however, to judge a book by its cover, title, the blurb on the back and its author’s history of writing ‘teenage fiction’ with one of her recent books described as a ‘tawdry little crotch tickler’ and an ‘indigestible hairball of spunk and spite’. It is with such a weak caveat that this reader must admit her reading of Sonya Hartnett’s Butterfly began with low expectations.

The cover is actually quite an inoffensive combination of yellows and pinks with flowers trailed all around in an attractive pattern. I was still at this point fully in the bigoted stages of reviewing and could not help a Pavlovian response to such stimuli: Yellow + Pink + Floral Decoration = book aimed for a female audience. Dare one say, chick-lit. This seemed at odds with the jacket’s alliterative promise of ‘deceit’, ‘despair’ and ‘desperation’. Those three words, in conjunction with the title, implied a gritty account of ‘coming of age’. A ‘butterfly’, of course, would therefore be a central metaphor in the book for the main character’s chrysalis-like shedding of the slough of youth, emerging to a new life in adulthood with its attendant responsibilities and so on and so forth and so much froth. The book’s précis outlines how this character, the thirteen-year-old Plum, ’suspects she is special, and that she has a grand destiny; yet all her life she has suffered more than others have seemed to’, which does little to dispel preliminary assumptions. All told, the book’s cover presented the novel as a maudlin, paint-by-numbers work about heart-wringing teenage angst.

This reaction does considerable disservice to Hartnett’s work. In many ways Butterfly is a shrewd and well-crafted novel that engages with themes of vulnerability (both adolescent and adult) in a frank and inventive way. The protagonist’s pain, longings and shame are uncomfortably well-drawn, most memorably in a ritualistic piercing of her ears at the hands of her peers. As the perspective switches, and the other members of her family are in turn given their own voices, one comes to appreciate Hartnett’s knack for presenting psychology and behaviour in brief tableaux.

The book does have its fair share of flaws. Hartnett’s obvious talent for ’saying a lot about very little’ is hindered by the way in which events are strung together with clumsy digressions, included in an attempt to make the characters’ emotions and thoughts explicit. One regrets Hartnett does not trust her obvious capacity for subtlety more often in the book. In the opening sections, certain misgivings concerning her use of metaphors also creep in. Sometimes they appear to miss the mark by trying too hard to be original: ‘her eyes are two sleepy panthers that wake up when she smiles’. This is disappointing because the author can turn a memorable phrase: ‘Saturday morning – the best corner of the week’ is a brilliant observation. The metaphors and similes at first occur simply too frequently, however; the reader is bombarded with surreal resemblances and outré comparisons at such a rate that they lose their impact. On the second and third pages alone one encounters eyes that are ‘the tarred tips of poison darts’, a stomach ‘the colour of uncooked dough’, silence ‘rolling’ up a spine ‘like a hearse’ and cheeks ‘the pasty yellow of cereal left to float all day in milk’.

Again, however, this reaction is premature. Whilst there are many portions of the book that seem over-saturated in their approximations of reality, these parts exist always in relation to Plum’s experience of life. Rather than over-gilding the work they actually serve to complement Plum’s character: they enact her own brand of inarticulacy. Mastery of language and the ability to express oneself is a source of confidence, and Plum’s damningly muddled use of terms and phrasing is summed up in such moments as her declaration to her family: ‘If I don’t believe in God, it’s stupid to go to Church. It’s hypothetical’. Here, the potential terrors of adolescence are neatly encapsulated: Plum knows how things should be, and how she wishes them to be, but does not yet have the wherewithal to express herself correctly.

Hartnett’s Plum is a triumph, a thoroughly engaging and believable creation. Couched in her capricious experience and told both from and around her point of view, the reader is able to unpeel Plum’s reality and view the dissatisfaction felt by her fellow characters. The energy of the book comes as these characters’ voices conflict and converge to prove this truth, each showing their inability to save one another from the dangers and frustrations of modern Australian suburban life.

The cast that crops up on the fringes of the novel such as the unseen Mr. Wilks, are in some ways more interesting than those who are referred to directly. Plum aside, they are often given too much credibility by the author without any real substance. For example, we are told her brother Cydar is a brooding, shadowy thinker. We are supposed to accept this is true because he takes drugs, wears dark nail-varnish and offers cod-philosophical asides. It feels as if we should be sympathetic to these characters but they so readily live up to their stereotypes it is difficult to have much truck with them; they complain of being misunderstood but the reader comes away struggling to maintain patience with them, let alone believe it is worth the effort.

The novel has moments of great comedy, insight and fine descriptive inventiveness. Overall, however, Butterfly is something of a moth to its own flame. The tone and pace do not quite justify the book’s ricocheting from flippancy to po-faced truisms and, at times, it feels as if it has suffered for lack of editing. As it stands, Butterfly is not a great deal more than the sum of its parts. Those parts are enjoyable enough, but one suspects that Hartnett is capable of much, much better.