A child's tale about a crime of passion

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Set in Tasmania, A Child's Book of True Crime opens with 22-year-old primary school teacher Kate Byrne driving to a hotel with her lover Thomas, whose son, a nine-year-old prodigy called Lucien, is teacher's pet.

Thomas's wife Veronica is busy promoting her new book, Murder at Black Swan Point, a "true life crime story" that took place several years earlier. As Kate's affair continues, her interest in the subject of Veronica's book deepens. The murder was a crime of passion, committed by the wife of a local vet who had been having an affair with his young assistant. After the girl's blood-soaked corpse had been discovered, the police found the wife's car abandoned near the rocks at Suicide Cliffs, and assumed she'd committed the crime, then killed herself.

At least, this is Veronica's version. So when Kate starts having accidents, she begins to imagine that Veronica, perhaps suspecting the truth about her and Thomas, may be planning to bump her off, too. To heighten the sense that Kate may be going mad, the scenes of sex, recrimination and murder are narrated by kiddie-friendly Aussie animals with cosy names like Wally Wombat and Kitty Koala. As it were, Hannibal read aloud by, say, Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat.

Kate organises a trip for the children to visit a former penal settlement, and wonders how many of her students "were descended from degenerates transported in the 19th century". Hooper juggles her narratives perfectly, and the layering of adulteries past and present is gripping and original. Above all, through Kate's unorthodox teaching methods, asking her pupils, "Can you always know truth?" and, "Why does God allow evil to occur?", and allowing them to answer, Chloe Hooper lays bare the uncomfortable combination in children of innocence and " original sin", and how both must be buried for them to become adults.

In Crow Lake, welcome back to the world of the smouldering " lake" saga. This one's a fable about what happens to a family of four children living out in the sticks by the lakes of northern Ontario, after their parents are killed in a car crash. The eldest son, Luke, 18, had been about to go to teacher's college thanks to his Presbyterian parents' frugal scrimping, but following their death, an aunt arrives and announces the children must be split up and farmed out to relatives. Luke's not having any of it, and surrenders his opportunity to escape in order to stay at home and bring up his two younger sisters, Kate, seven and baby Bo, himself, with the help of his brother Matt, who is a year younger.

The boys take on poorly-paid shift work from the neighbouring farmer, an exceptionally violent and unpleasant man, while do-gooding locals call in on the orphans with an endless stream of home-made pies, cookies and lemonade. The story starts to creak with inadequacy and guilt.

This is all in the past, narrated by the now-grown-up Kate who, thanks to her brothers' sacrifices, finally got away to college and has become an invertebrate ecologist, "specialising in the effects of pollution on the population of freshwater ponds". It's her way of trying to repay her debt to Matt, with whom she shared the happiest moments of her childhood, peering into the ponds at Crow Lake and watching waterboatmen skate. Kate is about to go home for a family celebration. Should she bring her boyfriend, who comes from a well-heeled academic family, and whose assumptions about learning and privilege are so different from hers? Who will be ashamed of whom?

Inevitably, Kate has grown apart from her siblings, and hasn't come to terms with the guilt she feels for having blighted her brothers' lives. More creaking. There's nothing subtle about Mary Lawson's portrait of the child who "gets away" and those left behind.

At times too, her storytelling lurches mawkishly into hillbilly Waltons territory. But a sharpish twist relating to the horrid farmer provides Crow Lake with just about enough suspense to keep you reading to the end.

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