Town Mouse Country Mouse: The Dark Side

Let us celebrate a birth. In her new novel The Knife Drawer Padrika Tarrant has breathed life into the love child of Angela Carter and David Lynch. Standing godparent at the font are Marina Warner and Beatrix Potter, though neither seems to be very interested in casting out the devil. In Tarrant’s idiosyncratic, claustrophobic universe, the moral high ground is visible only to mice.

The Knife Drawer revisits the uncomfortable and porous frontier between reality and fairytale which will be familiar to readers of Tarrant’s short story collection, Broken Things. The novel’s world is, as the world of any good novel should be, both specific and universal, shining a narrow beam through a crack in the skirting board to reveal, not just Johnny Town Mouse at dinner, but profound philosophical truths.

A single mother, the victim of physical abuse by her former partner, struggles to bring up her twin daughters. She has but a slender grasp of economic or domestic practicalities, with the result that the children’s material needs are neglected and the house is filthy, overrun by mice. The landlord’s agent exploits the mother, demanding sex in lieu of the rent she has no money to pay. The young woman’s own mother drops in from time to time but is eccentric and unreliable, and prone to violence. This small family, unknown to all outside agencies but the amoral rent man, turns in on itself with catastrophic results.

No, let’s rewind. Once upon a time a young woman gave birth to twin girls, both beautiful, one angel-fair, the other dark as earth. While she found it easy to love her fair daughter, Marie, she struggled to care for the dark twin, and could not even bring herself to name her, because the dark twin reminded her mother of the girls’ father. He vanished when the girls were still babies, but his presence haunts their mother. He beat her and she was terrified of him. Once he is gone, she seals up the parts of the house with which she associates him and tries to grow a new life over the old, like scar tissue over a wound. Unable to bear the continual reminder of her dark daughter, she banishes her. Only the girl’s strange, feral grandmother continues to care for her.

Or again, a woman who has suffered prolonged cruelty from her partner finally puts her foot down and kills him. Her twin baby daughters lie side by side in their cot, unaware of their mother’s eminently forgivable crime. At a loss what to do with the body, the mother drags it into the dining room, which the family never uses, and shuts the door on it.

Miraculously, within days, the body has entirely disappeared, but the mother’s conscience continues to gnaw at her whenever she contemplates her dark daughter, the one who reminds her of the dead father. She tries to carry on, to accept the good luck which got rid of the evidence, but suffers a breakdown and is unable to care for her children or her home. The children run wild and the house becomes infested with mice.

Now, finally, we get to the truth of it. In an old, remote and long-neglected house, the mice have lived peaceful and unchanging lives for many generations. Then, one day, the cutlery awakes. A dead man is flung into the dining room, where the mice make their homes in the chimneybreast, and the knives smell blood. For the mice, this is Armageddon. It is the beginning of the age of prophecy, of true and false messiahs and of being cast out into the wilderness. As the world of the damaged, guilt-ridden mother shrinks to a single armchair, the world of mice expands to encompass huge and important questions about faith and religion, sacrifice and love, about how societies are made and broken and learn to live with their fault lines. As the old house decays like a Southern Gothic belle gone to the bad, and the human family within breaks apart, the mice find courage and cohesion, a common purpose that will propel them towards a future bigger, brighter and more terrifying than anything their humble mouse imaginations could have conceived.

The Knife Drawer is a complex, many-layered novel, written in the deceptively simple prose of a fairytale. It is both impossible and scarily easy to believe in its world, in which an old house has feelings it can’t express, like someone suffering from dementia, the cutlery escapes from the sideboard to feast on blood and generations of mice live out in fast forward the millennia of human social development, while humans metamorphose into birds, seeds and more mice. Few writers could command the language to bring such a world to life, but Tarrant has a true poet’s ear for the image which is strange yet absolutely true. Milk boils over ‘like a time lapsed mushroom’, murder happens accidentally, ‘like a person spills tea’, the rent man comes ‘like a burst water pipe, or food poisoning’ to collect the money Marie owes but does not have, to exact his payment in kind.

Padrika Tarrant’s first novel is a disturbing, uncomfortable but compelling read. The language is dense, packed with unsettling images, contorted like bound feet or the branches of a bonsai tree to conform to a mode of storytelling and a style of beauty which are far from conventional. It is best read in a single sitting, without coming up for its contaminated air, or in very small doses. Either way, it will haunt your dreams.