Annabel by Kathleen Winter

Posted on: May 03, 2012

Annabel by Kathleen Winter

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

Its 1968 and in a tiny coastal town in the unflinching cold of Labrador, Canada, an unusual child is born to perfectly average parents. There is nothing that sets these parents apart from the rest of the population: Treadway works the traplines and hunts alone half the year as generations of men have done, and Jacinta runs their home just as every other woman in the town does hers. The child’s birth itself is not mysterious, nor is it particularly traumatic – Jacinta gives birth in her own home with help from the women in her community, particularly her friend Thomasina who has been present at many births before. But when the child is born, both Jacinta and Thomasina keep its gender a secret from the other women present and it is days before Treadway understands that his child is a hermaphrodite (or intersexed, in today’s preferred term). Supported by surgeons at the closest hospital, he decides the child is to be raised a boy and names him Wayne. But for Jacinta this is a complicated loss. “I’ve always felt,’ she says, ‘that daughter is a beautiful word’.

 

Kathleen Winter’s Annabel is a quietly assured debut novel, with a clear linear narrative that never veers from its path – neither in space or time, nor in its strong, almost hyper real quality. Her voice is lyrical, the imagery poignant and evocative of a landscape that will be alien to most of her readers, a landscape that is stark, unforgiving and unyielding to any deviations from its own very particular norm. And in that, Wayne’s story is perfectly placed here in complete opposition to what his surrounds allow. Against all odds, Wayne’s identity remains fluid, no matter the gender was chosen for him. As a child he is obsessed by the geometric beauty of bridges which of course adds to the idea of bridging genders or that of Wayneattempting to somehow connect two opposing sides of himself, although he does not know the truth about himself. Thomasina tells him, ‘everyone is a snake shedding its skin. We are different people through all our lives’.

Winter chooses each element of her narrative with great precision and attention to detail, but without ever weighing down the narrative. While most of her characters do appear to be unfathomably composed most of the time, her language is ripe with emotion. Making partridgeberry jam emits a ‘bloody mossy tang that smells and tastes more of regret than of sweetness’, and the meeting between wives and husbands who have returned home after months away hunting is ‘desire and fruition and death all in one ravenous gulp’.

There are, however, a few instances in the book that eventually cause it to be a little less believable. The very idea of an intersexed child growing older and discovering who he was born as should provide for much emotion from at least the character in question, but Wayne too grows quieter and more distant - much in the way his parents are. There are surprisingly no complex emotional breakdowns in Annabel, and little outwardly reaction to physical trauma and abuse. There is great potential for body horror at a number of instances but Winter remains true to her composed style and shies away from the grotesque. At discovering he was born intersexed, Wayne’s reaction is simply to try out the name Annabel as if this newfound knowledge has solved all his earlier confusion with no further questions asked. If this silence is intended to show strength of character, Winter has fallen just short of delivering.

Jeffery Euginedes’ Middlesex was probably the last well known book with an intersexed protagonist, and now Winter’s Annabel provides  a very different narrative. She does not explore gender identity in any detail and stays away from labels, looking instead at humanity, love, tolerance, friendships and family. Annabel is a good book, but because of a few small but pertinent impplausibilities it will never be regarded as a great book.