Growing Up Strange
Rebecca Mackenzie, In A Land of Paper Gods
Tinder Press, 353pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781472224194
reviewed by Ross Benar
Set in a missionary school in China in the 1940s, In a Land of Paper Gods is a religious novel, not only in content but in form. Rebecca Mackenzie's prose rings with religious sentiment: 'Even at that young age, I knew to bury these bones in the soft earth, to decorate the mounds with feather, shell and twig, to weave over a litany of prayers, calling to Jesus, the River God, the wind.' Hushed reverence, a sort of delicate holiness, almost surrounds the words. The religion within the story holds up well; the religion in the prose, less so.
The story begins as a boarding school tale and transitions into a story of captivity. Etta, our main character, is the traditional protagonist for this sort of story. She is curious, quick-witted and good-hearted, a schoolyard rascal with a heart of gold. What is fresh here is her firm and genuine belief in the Protestantism she's being taught. Her inevitable self-recriminations go down smooth as a young girl attempting to marry a strict religious upbringing to her merry prankersterism (as opposed to grappling with a more amorphous or arbitrary morality). There is also mention of a mule named Good News, which I found incredibly funny.
But if religion is the saviour of the story, it is the death of the prose, at least in the early going. In small doses, that sort of reverence can become powerful. It is not used in small doses in the early chapters, though, and it becomes ponderous, too concerned with itself rather than with telling the story. Once the novel finally moves into the school, it becomes much lighter, clearer; the religion is leavened by the dramatic ironies inherent in any story involving children. It's not exactly the freshest concept, but it's comfort food served well, making it a genuine joy to watch Etta grumble and grope her way through complicated-yet-childish social interactions.
Oddly (and impressively), the prose is best when Etta and her dormmates are engaged in conversation, Mackenzie handling multiple voices and perspectives clearly, effectively and with humour. ‘There was a tight silence while we hated each other.’ However, when Etta is alone and thinking to herself, her voice breaks and flows, often veering towards the squeamishly cutesy intonations of a parent mapping emotions onto their child, occasionally producing interesting turns of phrase but more often simply breaking the reader from the illusion that we're genuinely in a child's mind. It’s a very mannered style of writing that contrasts unfavourably with Mackenzie’s depictions of Etta in action.
One baffling aspect of the novel is the inclusion of several short journal entries written by Etta's dorm aunty, Aunt Muriel. They are apparently included to help sum up for the reader how an adult would react to the events they've just read in the previous sections, but frankly they are not very illuminating and serve mostly to demonstrate that the author doesn't fully trust her readers. We're interested and invested in Etta's story already; there's no need to bolster it with a few scattered journal entries that neither help develop it nor paint Muriel as a fully-fledged character. The plot is not particularly complex, so no help is needed there. It has the feeling of an attempted two-hander, contrasting Muriel and Etta’s experiences as female missionaries in China separated by age, but there’s no follow-through. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that the prose we've read so far has been written by Etta herself as a 15-year-old on board a ship bound for Southampton. Does she have Muriel's diary and has inserted the relevant entries chronologically? Or are the diary entries essentially a creative writing exercise, perhaps an attempt for Etta in her adolescence to understand herself as a youth? The structure of the novel is confusing, and I cannot see a justification for it other than an attempt to excuse the writer the privilege of indulgence.
I mentioned that the novel transitions from a school story to one of captivity. Both of these are handled well, the school story moving confidently through its tropes and the captivity section boldly skipping through time with any preemptory throat-clearing or explanation, which is refreshingly direct. Another refreshingly direct move Mackenzie makes is diving right in with realistic prose whenever Etta is imagining, providing no markers of fantasy until after each daydream is complete. It's effective and bold, and avoids unnecessary explanations. It's an instance of an author fully trusting her reader, making the odd diary entries even more of a let-down.
The section of the story when Etta leaves school, goes on an adventure and returns is less well handled. The prose skims along well enough, but we don't learn much new about Etta or, crucially, the area surrounding Lushan Mountain. We get a brief sketch of her journey to a mission house and her arrival back at school, and along the way receive hints and intimations about the lives of Chinese monks, a small family of Chinese lepers and the mission house, but Etta doesn't seem to have changed much as a result of her journey, except that for perhaps a dozen or so pages she is looked upon suspiciously. More importantly, there’s no sense of place, other than that of a generic sense of impending war. The book is titled In a Land of Paper Gods, but that very phrase, which refers to Chinese land and society not totally under the sway of the missionaries, remains not mysterious but simply underdeveloped. Etta’s journey into this land presumably attempts to rectify this situation but unfortunately does not. Instead, we’re left slightly frustrated at the possibilities of what this tangent could have been.
I don't think this is a bad novel, nor I do think Mackenzie is a bad writer. Debut novels are tricky, and it's better to be overambitious than under. There is one absolutely fantastic sequence involving a ring of prophetesses, an adopted daughter and a stolen knife that manages to viscerally punch through any hint of reserve in the text, forcing you to turn the pages slowly but with vigour, horrorstruck and enraptured. Any writer capable of that is someone worth watching. In a Land of Paper Gods feels like that writer’s first tentative steps. Hopefully the next novel will be a confident stride.
The story begins as a boarding school tale and transitions into a story of captivity. Etta, our main character, is the traditional protagonist for this sort of story. She is curious, quick-witted and good-hearted, a schoolyard rascal with a heart of gold. What is fresh here is her firm and genuine belief in the Protestantism she's being taught. Her inevitable self-recriminations go down smooth as a young girl attempting to marry a strict religious upbringing to her merry prankersterism (as opposed to grappling with a more amorphous or arbitrary morality). There is also mention of a mule named Good News, which I found incredibly funny.
But if religion is the saviour of the story, it is the death of the prose, at least in the early going. In small doses, that sort of reverence can become powerful. It is not used in small doses in the early chapters, though, and it becomes ponderous, too concerned with itself rather than with telling the story. Once the novel finally moves into the school, it becomes much lighter, clearer; the religion is leavened by the dramatic ironies inherent in any story involving children. It's not exactly the freshest concept, but it's comfort food served well, making it a genuine joy to watch Etta grumble and grope her way through complicated-yet-childish social interactions.
Oddly (and impressively), the prose is best when Etta and her dormmates are engaged in conversation, Mackenzie handling multiple voices and perspectives clearly, effectively and with humour. ‘There was a tight silence while we hated each other.’ However, when Etta is alone and thinking to herself, her voice breaks and flows, often veering towards the squeamishly cutesy intonations of a parent mapping emotions onto their child, occasionally producing interesting turns of phrase but more often simply breaking the reader from the illusion that we're genuinely in a child's mind. It’s a very mannered style of writing that contrasts unfavourably with Mackenzie’s depictions of Etta in action.
One baffling aspect of the novel is the inclusion of several short journal entries written by Etta's dorm aunty, Aunt Muriel. They are apparently included to help sum up for the reader how an adult would react to the events they've just read in the previous sections, but frankly they are not very illuminating and serve mostly to demonstrate that the author doesn't fully trust her readers. We're interested and invested in Etta's story already; there's no need to bolster it with a few scattered journal entries that neither help develop it nor paint Muriel as a fully-fledged character. The plot is not particularly complex, so no help is needed there. It has the feeling of an attempted two-hander, contrasting Muriel and Etta’s experiences as female missionaries in China separated by age, but there’s no follow-through. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that the prose we've read so far has been written by Etta herself as a 15-year-old on board a ship bound for Southampton. Does she have Muriel's diary and has inserted the relevant entries chronologically? Or are the diary entries essentially a creative writing exercise, perhaps an attempt for Etta in her adolescence to understand herself as a youth? The structure of the novel is confusing, and I cannot see a justification for it other than an attempt to excuse the writer the privilege of indulgence.
I mentioned that the novel transitions from a school story to one of captivity. Both of these are handled well, the school story moving confidently through its tropes and the captivity section boldly skipping through time with any preemptory throat-clearing or explanation, which is refreshingly direct. Another refreshingly direct move Mackenzie makes is diving right in with realistic prose whenever Etta is imagining, providing no markers of fantasy until after each daydream is complete. It's effective and bold, and avoids unnecessary explanations. It's an instance of an author fully trusting her reader, making the odd diary entries even more of a let-down.
The section of the story when Etta leaves school, goes on an adventure and returns is less well handled. The prose skims along well enough, but we don't learn much new about Etta or, crucially, the area surrounding Lushan Mountain. We get a brief sketch of her journey to a mission house and her arrival back at school, and along the way receive hints and intimations about the lives of Chinese monks, a small family of Chinese lepers and the mission house, but Etta doesn't seem to have changed much as a result of her journey, except that for perhaps a dozen or so pages she is looked upon suspiciously. More importantly, there’s no sense of place, other than that of a generic sense of impending war. The book is titled In a Land of Paper Gods, but that very phrase, which refers to Chinese land and society not totally under the sway of the missionaries, remains not mysterious but simply underdeveloped. Etta’s journey into this land presumably attempts to rectify this situation but unfortunately does not. Instead, we’re left slightly frustrated at the possibilities of what this tangent could have been.
I don't think this is a bad novel, nor I do think Mackenzie is a bad writer. Debut novels are tricky, and it's better to be overambitious than under. There is one absolutely fantastic sequence involving a ring of prophetesses, an adopted daughter and a stolen knife that manages to viscerally punch through any hint of reserve in the text, forcing you to turn the pages slowly but with vigour, horrorstruck and enraptured. Any writer capable of that is someone worth watching. In a Land of Paper Gods feels like that writer’s first tentative steps. Hopefully the next novel will be a confident stride.