Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Outstandingly good

I thought My Absolute Darling was outstandingly good.  It is beautifully written, remarkably insightful and completely gripping.

This is the story of 12-year-old Julia "Turtle" Alveson who lives with her survivalist father on the fringes of society in Mendocino, California.   She is skilled in guns, survival skills and so on, but at sea with other people and in social situations.  Told entirely from Turtle's point of view, we see her struggles with understanding her father's obsessive and abusive behaviour which she (and probably he) believes to be what love is.  As events and growing maturity begin to make her more aware, the tension between what she has believed and what she begins to recognise as reality grows and Turtle has to wrestle with where her future lies and how, if at all, she can realise it.

This doesn't sound like a great read on the face of it, but it is.  I genuinely found it hard to put this book down; the story is gripping, with some passages of incredible tension and real adventure, and Gabriel Tallent takes us right inside that young woman's head with her confusion, self-doubt (often spilling into self-loathing) and resilience in a way which I have seldom experienced.  The portraits of her and of her monstrous father are fantastically real, and I found the entire thing completely convincing.  Be warned that there are some quite horrifying scenes of child abuse, but they are absolutely justified in the context and excellently judged - a world away from the often offensively facile use of child abuse as a theme in run-of-the-mill thrillers.

The prose is excellent.  Gabriel Tallent writes in a measured, unmelodramatic but rather lyrical style, which brings the people, especially Turtle, wonderfully to life.  Just as a tiny example, we get sentences like this: "She waits there in the grass, feeling her every thought stored up and inarticulate within her," and this sort of brilliant distillation of internal experience shines through the book.  The sense of place is excellent and dialogue is completely convincing; I especially liked some wonderful episodes of the jokey, wordy, literate chatter of two High School boys as it contrasted with Turtle's near-silent inarticulacy.

I find it hard to express quite how good I thought this book was.  It is a rare combination of an utterly gripping story, excellent writing and genuine depth of content.  Very, very warmly recommended.