Cult Fiction - Amity & Sorrow

"She didn’t know that preparing for the end of the world would make it that 

much more likely to come. " 

Amity & Sorrow is the most recent book to keep me up all night. 

Despite my cynical predisposition - did I really want to read a novel about 'God, sex and farming?' - something stopped me from putting it down. Every time I tried, I found myself twisting to pluck it from the shelf again and resume its journey. Because it is a journey. This debut novel from US playwright Peggy Riley, journeys across rural, middle America and dusts you off on a small rapeseed farm in Oklahoma. It quests through a young girl's coming of age and a sister's development as an individual. It plots the love of a mother for her children and her husband and herself. It is an odyssey of human emotion. A voyage through a family's life. 

It rapidly becomes more complicated then a single, wayfaring wife and her naive offspring.The novel explores a harrowing journey through emotional, spiritual and physical abuse and although Riley conveys this trauma, she never clarifies its exact nature, letting her audience interpret for themselves. Her unique style, which is probably the reason for her novel's nomination for the Guardian First Book Award as well as its peculiarities, manipulates this ambiguity. By using the often out-of-vogue present tense, Riley begins 'in the middle of things', in the heart of her characters' plight. Slowly their stories unravel, creating a constant, compelling tug that becomes a desperate rush towards the conclusion. 

 Riley weaves the plot together through moments of reflection set against the immediate present. With each flashback, another stitch in the fabric of this family's story reveals itself and elicits a little more sympathy for characters that initially seem foolish, spoilt and strange. The shadowy cloisters of their past wrestle with the beating sun of a modern, alien world, but slowly the reasons for why Amaranth has fled with her daughters, and why their car crash means they must rely on the generosity of a farmer, spins into darker, creepier territory. Looming over them is the threat of their father and his Messianic cult. 

Fear and love compel Riley's story. As one daughter waits 'for the end of the world' and the other ricochets between love for her mother and adoration of her sister, their mother struggles to release them from their shared history. For these characters, 'the world is coming apart at the seams' but they are bound together, bound by a 'thread sewing [them] down to [their father] and all' his fifty wives. The potential to escape only exists if they are willing to travel through fire, to burn, but who will brave the fire and who will survive it is left to the final, desperate conclusion. 

Whilst at times Riley's narrative style loses clarity, somehow it always regains its footing, upping the momentum as it does so. It is one of my favourite books of this year and I highly recommend it. 

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
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