Sacred Country, Rose Tremain's 1992 novel, has recently been released in paperback. It was pretty much ignored by the gay community when it first came out, which is too bad, because it's a beautifully written, moving and enormously compassionate story of an English girl's discovery that she feels more like a man that a woman. It's a quirky story, filled with odd and frightening characters - a butcher's son who sings himself mute trying to yodel, a gay dentist who lives with his mother on a cliff slowly crumbling into the sea, a woman driven insane by her violent husband - all of which add up to a piercing and insightful map of loneliness.
Tremain writes simple sentences, straightforward language which changes subtly to reflect the passing of the 30 years the novel covers. It's a smart choice, the simplicity. Sometimes the novel is confident and direct, as when Mary, the protagonist, tells her pet guinea fowl, "I have a secret to tell you, dear, and this is it: I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I'm a boy." At other moments, Tremain sneaks up on her subject, as in this sequence, worth quoting at length since the power of the writing builds slowly, which describes the death of the yodeler's father:
"He stood very still as he worked. He was forty-nine years old. Since the end of the war
he had been entirely happy.
He looked up from the block for a split second. He fancied he had heard, in the midst of
the dawn quiet, the shop bell jingle.
His right hand should have paused half-way from his shoulder but it did not. It brought
the cleaver down on his three fingers resting on the duck's neck and sliced them off, just
above the knuckles.
He saw what had happened. He saw his three ends of fingers lying on the block and
thought, I have done a fatal thing, I have done something that has no ending and no resolution....
His right hand lost all its strength and the cleaver fell out of it and clattered to the floor.
This little noise might have woken Grace, far above, but it did not. Sunday morning sleep
was precious and she turned over and sighed and went back to her dreams."
Tremain's events are so volatile that as to verge on melodrama, but her journalistic diction lends her plot immense power, and the occasional moments of poetry become all the more affecting. The description of the butcher as "entirely happy" could have come across as sentimental, but as a prelude to an entirely accidental, senseless death, conveyed in terse, straightforward prose, it is instead a moving representation of feelings so strong they could only be simple.
Tremain has a great ability to convey a mounting sense of danger and claustrophobia with everyday imagery, particularly when describing Mary's parents, Estelle and Sonny. Sonny is cruel and alcoholic, and ultimately drives Estelle to an insane asylum, the only place she can find any peace or contentment. Early in the book, Tremain writes a section from Estelle's point of view. One paragraph begins commonly enough: "'You're everything to me, Estelle,' Sonny still sometimes says" and it's easy to be lulled by the cliche. But Tremain turns every cliche into a revelation. The paragraph continues in Estelle's voice, with poetic images culled from daily life: "It's then that I know his breath is killing me. You cannot be everything to a person and still survive. I go to my sewing machine. To me, it is a flawless thing, designed by a mind that did not lie to itself."
Sacred Country is a book that I want to quote again and again, and at length, to my friends; it rang that true. Take, for instance, this long description of Walter, the yodeler. Walter has previously slept only with an aged female fortune-teller at the county fair, until he goes driving with and then is seduced by his dentist, Gilbert Blakey, who is gay and a virgin. They are discussing the recent assassination of Kennedy when Gilbert puts his hand on Walter's thigh:
"Walter didn't move. He looked down at the hand as though it were a thing that had landed
on him from outer space. He saw that it was a pale hand, lightly freckled with soft blond hairs
on the back of it. The fingers were very long and the nails perfect and shiny. Walter wondered
whether he should say anything. He wanted to ask, Do you want me to say anything, Mr.
Blakey? He turned his head, just fractionally, so that he could see Gilbert's face and his
expression. Gilbert was staring ahead at the road. It was as though the hand that he'd put on
Walter's knee didn't belong to him, as though he hadn't noticed that it was there. Walter thought,
in a moment or two, he'll take his hand away and we'll start a new conversation about some
ordinary thing, not Kennedy, and this moment will not have happened. It will be like everything
else; in the past and not there. He had an erection. He didn't often get them. He wanted Gilbert's
hand to stay and the erection to stay. He didn't want these things to disappear into time. So he put
his own wide, cumbersome hand on Gilbert's slim one. Touching it was like touching a meteorite,
just as extraordinary. He moved the hand up his thight. He felt a wild, hot happiness."
Rarely have I read such a strong description of the mix of emotion and wonder and shame and distance that I feel in my life.
Ironically, Rose Tremain is not a lesbian - she lives outside of London with her boyfriend - and ultimately, Sacred Country is not about the daily lives of gays, lesbians, or transexuals. The characters in Sacred Country are mostly alone, wrestling with their conflicts between the spirit and the body. They are lonely and out of place - in fact, when they develop relationships with others, they generally fade out of prominence in the novel. Tremain's gift is to depict these states with eloquence and compassion. So while she doesn't describe the daily prejudices queers encounter, or the communities queers build, or the pros and cons of hormone treatments, she does succeed in providing an eloquent, moving, passionate portrayal of the emotional lives of outsiders. And while she may not offer much hope of us being "entirely happy," she at least gives hope of our understanding our lives on a deeper and more meaningful level and a firm belief that the quest for understanding is paramount. And that is an enormous and uncommon gift.