The Hiding Place

I won't easily forget this book, which is a story about people and remembering people. The most gorgeous aspect of the writing is how a moment or a feeling becomes perfectly captured in brief, humble lines of prose. Azzopardi does not use long discursive explanations which are so often relied upon by authors. Each character becomes flesh and blood through short paragraphs and careful breaths. The sensitivty of the telling draws you in just as much as the tragedy of the story. I am grateful for writers who seek our imagination via the heart. Azzopardi appears to be one of them.

I've been making an effort to read each of the Booker Prize nominees for this year - this was the second I picked up. Within the first ten pages I was greatly impressed by Azzopardi's use of language and the flow of her sentences. By page twenty I was enthralled by the characters and the narrative. By the time I finished "The Hiding Place" I was as moved as any novel I have ever been fortunate to lay my hands on.This is a tremendous novel that I cannot say enough about. The story of Dol and the family Gauci is often disturbing, but is written so beautifully that I couldn't help but be drawn into the tale. I am a harsh critic of over-sentimentality, and a story like this could have easily spiraled into self-pity. Azzopardi doesn't allow that to happen. She manages to allow the characters to be utterly human, imperfect, and infected. "The Hiding Place" is the best novel I've read in five years.

Azzopardi has taken the narrative device of Tristram Shandy or Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and used it to delve deeply into the pain of the human psyche. We see a child, Dolores, from before she is born, but instead of being welcomed into the world, her birth corresponds with the end of life as the rest of her family has known it. Her father, mistakenly believing he has finally sired a son after five daughters, gambles away everything he has. Then when he wants to gamble more, he takes away his wife's painstakingly saved funds, at the same time one of her sisters burns down the house; the mother has begun her descent into madness and forgets Dolores, who is so badly burned she loses a hand. The cost of all this is one of her sisters, whom she never knows. In turn, each of her sisters is lost, and her parents lost, in some way, until Dolores is adopted and spends thirty years away from them all. Her mother's death brings her back, and all the family secrets are revealed, and so too are all the bonds that hold the family together and yet devour them at the same time. To me, the key is the contrast between the prose, which is light, and the events described, which range from arranged marriage without love to arson to child battering to selling a child into prostitution. It's the kind of book that makes you want to scream at the characters, "Don't do that!" and also the kind of book that makes you want to stop and think and re-read passages again and again. That it's a first novel is simply amazing.

British first-time novelist Trezza Azzopardi stuns with her accomplished portrait of childhood deprivation, a terrain where want goes begging and kindness is stillborn. With a rundown immigrant enclave in Cardiff, Wales, as its setting, The Hiding Place is the story of the Gauci family. Father Frankie, whose "love is Chance" is a Maltese seaman. A selfish, unrepentant child abuser and thief, he values an inherited ruby ring more than his daughters whom he barters for a stake. His wife, Mary, the mother of six girls, is sometimes forced to sell herself for rent money. Madness is her escape from an intolerable existence. Related in the voice of the youngest child, Dolores, the saga of this family causes readers to ponder the vagaries of birth and life's inequities. As adults, each daughter is haunted by a painful past, days in which their diversions were hopscotch in a dusty alley or inflicting cruelty upon one another until they are relegated to foster care. Ms. Azzopardi's evocation of the littered byways and musty bars of a small dockside community is flawless, as are her portraits of those we meet there. A finalist for the coveted Booker Prize, The Hiding Place is a trenchant, superbly crafted tragedy. It is a bleak but dazzling book.

I was reminded of the memorable opening of Faulkner's story "Barn Burning," in which the little boy protagonist is present while his father is accused of malicious arson; the first sentence: "The store in which the Justice of the Peace's court was sitting smelled of cheese." The narrative point of view is that of a na?ve witness; one might say na?ve voyeur. Adult crime, adult atrocity, is filtered through the five senses of a hungry child. The child, even though abused (and because abused), cannot pass judgment on his own dysfunctional kin. Azzopardi's story bears comparison with Faulkner's not only because they share a limiting point of view, but also because both record in intense detail the sensory world of their protagonist. This technique is not new; it's Huckleberry Finn's point of view. But Azzopardi, to my mind, excels Faulkner by avoiding his departures into highfalutin editorializing but also by accepting the rigors of the present tense, which has both the artistic limitations and the immediacy of film - if film could also capture the sound of a rabbit being gutted, the acrid smell beneath the perfume, the watery taste of blackberries, the texture of mud and concrete and old linoleum. One might be reminded of Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy," an experiment in objectively descriptive fiction; but while Robbe-Grillet's attention to detail seems obsessive, even solipsistic, Azzopardi's story is set in a world whose characters are as richly diverse as any in Dickens and as psychologically complex as any in modern fiction. They are frightening. They are lovable. Yes, readers will be deeply moved by the humanity of the tale - its horror and its humor - but it is Azzopardi's language, her handling of the emotionally-charged image, her ability to capture a place, a time, a person in a totally original turn of phrase that suggests that this first novel is a remarkable accomplishment. Even though hard to put down, "The Hiding Place" is not an "easy read"; but it invites comparison with the works of major novelists. One reader wondered if this would be a "one-off" success; we hope it won't be. The challenge to Trezza Azzopardi must be daunting. But very encouraging. For lovers of both literature and life, "The Hiding Place" is compulsory reading.