A Child's Book of True Crime: A Novel - Hardcover

Hooper, Chloe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743225120 ISBN 13: 9780743225120

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2002

Synopsis

Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted fourth grader, Lucien. Her lover's wife has just published "Murder at Black Swan Point," a true crime story about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress in a nearby town. When Lucien begins to display violent imagery in his crayon drawings, Kate wonders how well her pupil understands his mother's grisly work and why he's been exposed to it. Suspecting this account of Black Swan Point's murder to be inaccurate, Kate imagines another version of the story -- for children, and narrated by Australian animals. But will her fixation with the crime -- and Lucien's family -- align her fate with that of the murdered girl? In "A Child's Book of True Crime," Chloe Hooper brilliantly portrays a young woman reluctant to enter or conform to the world of adults. Kate Byrne is enthralled by the lives of her nine-year-old students, while remaining a misfit among their parents. And though Lucien's father brings her to life sexually in encounters of escalating eroticism, he cannot dull her obsession with the past. Fixated on the crime of passion that occurred years earlier, Kate is becoming less and less aware of her own reputation in the present, an unraveling that Hooper captures so chillingly in this intense, superbly crafted first novel.

About this title

Review:

Australian debut novelist Chloe Hooper's A Child's Book of True Crime is the chillingly erotic account of a disturbed young woman's adulterous journey to her own sexually dark core. When vulnerable trainee teacher Kate Byrne embarks on an affair with her most gifted student's father, she exposes herself to nightmare visions of the repercussions of her sins--the themes of crime and punishment hang heavily over the narrative, which is set in the former penal colony of Tasmania. Kate grows to identify so much with Ellie Siddell, whose bizarre 1983 murder at Black Swan Point is the subject of her lover's wife's true crime novel, that she imagines the pair are trying to kill her, just as Margot Harvey and her veterinary husband, Ellie's boss and lover, were implicated in Ellie's vicious murder.

As anyone who has read the Brothers Grimm will testify, fairy tales are far from innocently penned ditties and the wolf lying in wait for Red Riding Hood can be interpreted in many ways. Hooper knows this and plays with it. The novel opens with Kitty Koala and Terence Tiger stumbling across the bloody crime scene and interspersed between the episodes with the animals' investigating Ellie's murder is a very adult tale of deceit and treachery.

In Stalinist Russia, blacklisted writers and artists had embedded secret messages in children's literature. Beautiful books were created, full of allegory, and the adults would read them before bedtime and remain fast asleep; disguised as the naïve, subversive content was unrecognisable. Children, hearing snoring, would gently take the books from their parents' hands. They'd ... tiptoe off to read the real story."

In Hooper's world, the children are all-seeing and the adults are the ones blinded by desire. Everything is subverted. Whilst the adults' sexual games take on a child-like quality with Kate playing the naughty schoolgirl to Thomas's stern chider, the children discuss evolution, the existence of God and Truth. Although Kate eventually uncovers the answers to Ellie's murder, the reader is left with more questions than answers to Kate's identity. Hooper, who has a mentor in Philip Roth, enchantingly layers her slender novel with many equally dark and illuminating levels, leaving the reader to chase breathlessly after her elusive truth. --Nicola Perry

Review:

Fay Weldon author of "The Life and Loves of a She-Devil" Chloe Hooper is a novelist of undoubted power and remarkable literary skill.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743225120
• ISBN 13: 9780743225120
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 238