“We swam in water that changed colour by the weather”

I’ve read Kirsty Gunn’s novels in mostly antichronological order, but I’ll write about the last two the right way round. Rain, her first, was the last I read, but I think that really contributed to my appreciation of it. How often do we go back and read a newly-beloved author’s back catalogue only to be disappointed by early efforts? Nothing wrong with that either. But Gunn had her act together from the beginning.

At this point I feel like I understand the things she’s interested in. Family is huge: the relationships between mothers and their children, parents and their children, siblings. Featherstone and some short stories deal with aunts, uncles, grandparents, but the mother/child relationship is foremost in the rest of her work.

In Rain, the family takes the form of a boozy mother, a father preoccupied with placating her, a 12-year-old daughter brought up to act like a nice little waitress, and the 5-year-old brother that she cares for most of the time. The parents are physically present but alternate between emotional absence and reckless emotional torture. The children escape during the day to the lake and during the night, when mom and dad are having loud parties with their tipsy friends, to Janey’s room, where they close the door, turn out the light, and pretend to be asleep.

Janey’s life is all about protecting her little brother, Jim Little. She is his mother all day, watching him play at the beach, making him picnic lunches. But she knows their real parents can still “get” them—“It was me he called out for, but it was her soft hair that brushed across his face when she leaned over him in bed at night.” Gunn is already able to bring great depth to her young narrator:

We have to share their lives, their homes and all their tricks. It’s what we’re born to. We grow and lengthen, spawn fills our own sacs, and still they want to keep us as their young. We’re their living, heaving seed. Proof that they ever loved.

Gunn’s other big interest, as I’ve written about before, is place, and above all water and light. Rain is almost completely composed of this, it seems at times. And after reading Gunn write about these things in several novels and stories now, what impresses most is that it’s always different and fresh. And really lushly evocative.

From out of the cleft of bush it came on, a slow deep plough of water carving a smooth passage between the hills, wanting to change. As you came closer you saw how dark the water was, how complicated by shadows from the overhanging growth, how the jade insides of the water were flecked with gold. Trapped below the water’s surface, hanks of pale blond weed washed endlessly downstream. It was so quiet you could hear the water sucking around the strands, so quiet you could hear bubbles of air forming and breaking, the soaken air trying to breathe.

Tension is also a common thread in Gunn’s writing. Everything she describes so poetically is ill-fated. Jim Little is just a slip of a thing; Janey narrates her childhood as an adult but she’s only ever known Jim as a boy. And there’s so much water everywhere. The whole thing is well-managed, and the climax handled much like in Featherstone but, I think, more effective here.

Rain is just a slip of a novel but really fine. I know I’ll be picking this one up again and again for the beautiful language and imagery.