I've read several debut novels over the last week or two and while I've been pleased by their variety in terms of style and subject matter - they've shown originality, and distinctiveness of voice - I've also been impressed by the high standard of writing. The latest, and by no means least, in this run of good books is Amity & Sorrow
Peggy's experience as a playwright is evident here in her skill with dialogue and pacing and dramatic tension, but she has a novelist's flair for background, detail and observation, and for the telescoping of a life into a few episodes from which a big story emerges.
A woman crashes her car into a tree on an Oklahoma farm. She has been driving almost non-stop for four days, her eyes more often on the road behind her for fear of pursuit than on the way ahead for she has no clear destination, her only option is flight. With Amaranth are her two daughters, Amity and Sorrow; one, like her mother, wants only to get away, the other is desperate to get back home. But home was on fire when they left it, besieged by police, defended by the girls' father Zachariah, husband to Amaranth and forty-nine other women. Now here on the ramshackle farm where a moment's inattention has left them stranded, far from the fundamentalist cult of which they were a part, they face an uncertain future, dependent on the charity of Bradley, his helper Dust and his aged father. For Amity and Sorrow who have never known anything but the rules and customs of Zachariah's community, this new world is a strange place, but while Amity tries to fit in and be a part of it, Sorrow does not, and her extreme beliefs will put them all in danger.
In a book about a dark subject, there is still some humour to set the world back to rights, and this again shows Peggy's way with words and her ability to direct a scene to great effect. In among all that's warped and twisted, misshapen, misunderstood, there are universal human impulses and the very 'ordinariness' of daily life which resets the moral compass and keeps bringing the story itself back to the long straight road with which we can all identify, though those turnings off the beaten track to places where disturbing things happen and innocence has another meaning are signposted just as clearly and explored every bit as thoroughly.
It strikes me that after spending so much time living through her work with people whose mindset and behavioural code are far-removed from the mainstream, Peggy must have needed some kind of virtual decompression, but that again is testament to her mastery of her craft - how well her immersion in her subject matter has translated to the page. This is a great piece of writing, and I look forward to Peggy's next book.
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