Chekhov’s dramatic principle about guns – that if you have one hanging on the wall in the first act, it needs to go off at some point – is followed to the letter in Jennifer Clement’s superb new novel. There are a great number of guns in this book, all of which are described with clinical efficiency, and whenever they are fired, something bad happens. Yet there’s also a great deal of love here; amid the violence and hopelessness of gun-crazed contemporary America, humanity breaks through.
In the otherworldly Florida milieu that Clement depicts, half hell and half purgatory, nondescript characters flit about, scraping by with dead-end jobs and no prospects. Margot France is no exception, a young woman living in a broken-down car with her 14-year-old daughter, Pearl. At first glance, she is no less of a wreck than her neighbours. A teenager when she got pregnant, she left her well-to-do family in disgrace, fleeing to this place in the middle of nowhere. She brings a sensibility at odds with received notions of trailer park America: Margot and Pearl dine off Limoges china, a family possession, and, in one striking set piece, Margot revives a long-submerged talent on the piano to play Rachmaninov in her local church.
But destiny and the gun aren’t far away, in the charismatic but satanic form of Eli Redmond, whom Margot falls for, with disastrous results.
There are similarities, in the first half at least, between Gun Love and Emma Donoghue’s Room. Both are excellent at describing the intensity of the love between a mother and child within a claustrophobic environment, and the disruption that a hostile male presence causes to this bond. However, while Room’s midway change of setting leads to catharsis, Chekhov’s maxim holds true here, and Clement’s true protagonist, Pearl, finds herself on a near-surreal journey across Trump’s America, where she finds unexpected kindness and institutional neglect in equal measure.
Clement’s spare, often oblique style makes this book feel like a great lost murder ballad by the likes of Johnny Cash or Nick Cave. Seen through the eyes of Pearl, whose initially naive perspective is soon toughened by brutal experience, it has some moving poetic flourishes: a victim of violence is described as walking “straight into the shooting gun like she was walking into a water sprinkler on a hot Florida day in July”. There are echoes here of other great chroniclers of violence, such as Cormac McCarthy, and this is one of those rare books that the reader might wish to be a few dozen pages longer, to spend some more time in this fully realised world; a couple of characters feel underdrawn. Nonetheless, by the time that the long-awaited showdown between Eli and Pearl comes around, readers will feel conflicted by their own response to the horrors and wonders that they have encountered.
• Gun Love by Jennifer Clement is published by Hogarth (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Fiction
