In this haunting and hypnotic first novel from the award-winning poet, life imitates art and art imitates life. Set between London, Paris and the Amazon rainforest, it’s the story of a painter, Dominique, who hasn’t seen her father in more than three decades; he abandoned their family when she was six. As an adult, she travels to Venezuela to see the Angel Falls, but instead sees her father’s face “in the wildest place on Earth”. Back in London, she receives a letter from him, saying that he is dying. It trembles in her hand “as if she’s holding Angel Falls – a kilometre-long cataract shrunk to the size of a page … She unfolds it and it fills the room.” In time, she’ll tell herself: “I’m not mourning him – I’m mourning his second departure. He only got in touch to leave us.”
A gravitational force pulls her to Paris, where her father is living in the Latin Quarter. There she finds repressed memories: “37 dormant years suddenly awakened by the heat of his room”. Whenever she leaves him, she has to “shock herself back into the world”. What happened to her all those years ago? What happened to her mother and her sister, Vero, and why are they no longer a family?
Petit skilfully weaves a gorgeous tapestry of prose. The juxtaposition and superimposition of landscapes and geographies, past and present, the human and natural worlds, words and images, the French concrete jungle and the Amazonian forest, make the “days merge into one another”. The many worlds of the novel collide, even eclipse one another. “Our spirit world is like your left hand,” says Juan, her guide in the Amazonian forest. “It exists next to your right hand, which is the visible world, almost identical but different. Sometimes the two worlds meet.”
What follows is two years of visits to seek some answers, to fill her patchy memory. Some days, when it’s too painful to be in his presence, she’s “an anonymous tourist in her father’s city”, and the “day is fatherless”. Paris is a palimpsest, overwritten and veneered by the Venezuelan Amazon, which she visits as her relationship with Juan grows. In Paris, she goes to the zoo, writes in her “father journal”. Back in her London flat, she throws herself into paintings that are “so hard to make and so easy”. “Dominique thinks she died at the age of six. That her life as a painter is an afterlife she’s created from paint.”
Written in four parts and short chapters, My Hummingbird Father disentangles the relationship between art and abuse, and is shot through with epistolary elements and diary-like entries. Dominique is determined to “paint what hurts until it’s better. She can change the past with art. What would she do without art?” The novel is a redemption song and an ode to the lost innocence of childhood. Petit’s writing is as vivid as Dominique’s brushstrokes: here, there’s a forest full of fluttering, buzzing, rustling; there, Paris’s rues and boulevards, gargoyles and church bells. The author peels back layers and layers, only to reveal more secrets, losses, traumas.
The novel explores family history, memory, psychogeography, and what the role of art as therapy might be. Through lyrical and lush descriptions of flora and fauna, interspersed with scenes of power and abuse, it asks if we can ever truly forgive those we love. In one scene, Dominique “thinks of a forest of hummingbirds without hearts. How they are still able to fly backwards, forwards, sideways, upside down, for milliseconds after their hearts have been torn out.” Ultimately, and despite its departures and deaths, this is a novel about life.
• My Hummingbird Father by Pascale Petit is published by Salt (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
