I have just finished reading Kathleen Winter's novel Annabel, and am still rather stunned by the experience. Richly-worded, poignant, touching, and redemptive, although not in that all-too-easy, pat kind of ways that many novels tend to slide into, but with a hard earned and ultimately more rewarding redemption, it is a treasure of a novel, one I wish to hold close to me and dip into again and again.
Annabel is the story of an only child, born a true hermaphrodite, into a harsh world, a world where roles are strictly defined. Arbitrarily it seems, the decision is made, by the father, Treadway, that the child will be a boy. It would have been very easy for Kathleen Winter to portray Treadway as a harsh man but even from the beginning we see his softer edges and we realize that he is acting in what he believes are his sons best interests, and that his motivation is for protection and adaptation in a world that he sees as, in many ways sharply delineated.
This arbitrary assignment of gender to a child is very disconcerting, and from the beginning, in the hospital where the child is surgically rendered male, we see this need for self-justification and convincing of the rightness of the decision, which really does not seem that clear at all.
But of course, things aren't that simple. This rending of the child in two, the outer Wayne and the inner Annabel, has profound repercussions, both for the child who tries to be a good child to both his parents despite his increasing confusion, and his parents. Treadway has only meant the best for his son, and was convinced that his decision was the best way for his child to face living in a world that can be very harsh in its expectations, but in building up his son, he comes very close to sacrificing his daughter.
Although Jacinta and Treadway muddle through for years, when Wayne/Annabel leaves for the city, they seem to fall apart. Treadway wishes to retreat more to the combined physical/spiritual world of nature where he is not faced with the pain of the fact that despite his best intentions and his best efforts, he has not "made it right". Jacinta seems to fall apart completely, but the truth is that she has been slowly disintegrating since that day in the hospital, where the incisions to render her child a boy seems to have cut into her very soul.
Shortly after the surgery, sitting with a friend who has lost a husband and daughter, we have this conversation:
'If a stranger came here now' Jacinta said, 'they would guess I was the one who had lost a man and a daughter.
'You won't lose Treadway unless you want to lose him. Treadway is a husband for life.'
'I know.'
'But it looks to me like I am not the only one who has lost a daughter.'
'I've always felt,' Jacinta said, 'that daughter is a beautiful word.'
And later, when an event has occurred that has lead to the loss of her child's innocense, Jacinta berates herself:
"I am dishonest. I never tell the truth about anything important. And as a result, there is an ocean inside me of unexpressed truth. My face is a mask, and I have murdered my own daughter"
But Wayne does go out into the world, as children do, and begins to find his own path despite opposition and even hurt and pain. Seeing and accepting his son, and experiencing for the first time the rage of a father against a man who has hurt his daughter, Treadway is forced to reconcile his own feelings and actions with what he knows of the world. Jacinta has been mourning the loss of a daughter for years, even as she loves the son. Only when Treadway finds his daughter and makes room for her in his heart can he begin to mend, in his own quiet way, the wounds in his marriage.
I highly recommend this novel. Kathleen Winter takes an exception to what we perceive as normal and forces to question our own perceptions and assumptions, while at the same time telling a compelling story, that is touching, heart-rending, and compelling. She takes a family and a life and tells it in a way, that it can touch any life, in the best tradition of story-telling.