A terrifying and inspiring read.
Turtle Alveston is fourteen and lives alone with her survivalist father, whom she fondly calls daddy. The author, Gabriel Tallent, has written a harrowing and confronting examination of an abusive relationship, the material so challenging at times that you almost flinch. This story is raw, just like the eggs Turtle cracks straight into her mouth for breakfast each morning, throwing her daddy a beer as she does so.
Turtle’s inner monologue propels the narrative, and it’s here that we gain an understanding of her strength. As a reader, I found myself willing Turtle to prevail and simply couldn’t put the book down such was my concern for her. Tallent said he wanted to “write a story of resistance, of someone fighting to be the right person. Her circumstances, maybe we understand to be shameful, but that’s not her fault.”
I was also interested in the fact the book is written by a man with the lead protagonist being a young woman. I watched an interview with Tallent and he talked about this:
“When you are writing fiction about someone you are not, someone different from you – you’re always writing across a divide of privilege, you’re writing across the table of gender, and it can be blinding. What I tried to do was bring my own vantage point – I had seen things that were important, and I understood things to be true and I wanted to write those as I had seen them. Fiction becomes a project of trying to see other people clearly.”
The omnipresence of guns throughout the story is frightening, Turtle herself being an accomplished gun-handler. Yet, for me, the guns were overshadowed by the more sinister threat of violence posed by the looming presence of the unhinged and unpredictable father. Tallent talks about how he wanted to “try and show the awfulness of violence to get the point across, that hurting children is wrong – that the legacy of it is terrible.”
I wondered how female readers might respond to this novel and jumped online to check reviews. From what I could see the response from female reviewers was unequivocally affirmative. There was recognition that My Absolute Darling whilst a harrowing read is nonetheless a brilliant book.
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