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** spoiler alert ** **spoilers ahead, please be warned**

Published in 1994, and adapted into a New Zealand film in 2001, "Rain" is the literary debut novel by Kirsty Gunn. I didn't enjoy this short, plotless, meandering book, but my friend Lynn thinks this is a strong novel, and we had a good discussion about the storytelling choices and why this book works so well for her.

The story is told in first person, from the perspective of the protagonist, Janey, who is looking back on the summer when she was twelve. Janey's parents are upper-middle class white folks who own a summer lake house, and they host raucous parties for their adult friends each night. Janey and her five-year-old brother, Jim, are mostly left to care for themselves through the summer. They spend their days wandering the marshland around the lake, playing in some kind of estuary or confluence, where they swim, fish, build sand castles or mud castles, sit in a sailboat they can't sail, and just pass the time with each other.

It was never made clear how old Janey is as the narrator looking back on this summer, a summer which turns out to be an extremely traumatic time in her life. Based upon the naive and uninformed statements Janey makes in this book, I would guess she is only twenty or maybe thirty as the narrator, or possibly still a teenager, age 18 or 19. She doesn't seem to have received any therapy to help her process what happened, and she makes no statements in the book to orient the reader to her current mindset in any satisfying or enlightening way. The purpose of this book is to narrate the long days of her summer that lead to the final pages of the book, when sudden devastation and trauma occurs. The book ends at the very moment a plot seems to arrive.

I had originally assumed Janey's 12th summer took place in the early 1990s, but after talking with my friend Lynn, I realized the author had set the story in the early 1970s. Ms. Gunn was born in 1960, so she would have turned twelve herself in 1972. Given that knowledge, it does make sense that this novel is set in 1972, though the text itself never provides any dates. The author also grew up in New Zealand, so I believe the novel is set in New Zealand, though the text itself never gives specific setting details. Nature, and the lake environment around the house, is given a lot of description in this short book, but I did not realize the novel was set in New Zealand until after I finished the book and researched the author.

According to my friend Lynn, a reader can look at all of the long, plotless exposition of the natural world in "Rain," which makes up the bulk of this book, and understand it to be a detailed metaphor for Janey's adult interior self: she is awash in a numbed state of emotion, living in a perpetual state of lassitude after what has happened to her. She has been unable to process or come to grips with her trauma, and she is narrating the earliest phase of her journey of healing, wherein she gives voice to the traumatic event, and nothing more. This explains why the book ends just as the plot appears, or just at the moment when the traumatic event occurs, because the adult Janey is finally leaving her state of numbness and/or denial to acknowledge that something terrible happened to her when she was twelve.

If you are someone who likes funeral scenes in movies that take place in the rain on gray, stormy days, scenes that use the environment to represent the emotion of grief so that the characters never have to name any of their feelings at all, then you will enjoy "Rain" a lot more than I did. After reflecting at length on this book, I have decided I do not enjoy books that rely solely on the natural setting to instruct the reader on a character's emotional state. It feels cheap to me. It feels like shoddy prose.

The film version of "Rain" drew attention to things that I completely misread or failed to pay close attention to in the narrative. In the movie, Janey is older than twelve, more sexually aware of herself, and she is competing with her mother for the attention of the adult men who show up at her parents' house parties. There was nothing like that in the novel. In the book, Janey has no narrated awareness of her sexuality, but there is one adult who does: an adult man comes into the bedroom Janey shares with her brother late one night, and while the reader fears the man is coming to rape Janey, Janey's mother quickly appears and leads the man away. The man doesn't appear on the page again until the final pages in the book, when he suddenly shows up at the lake, while Janey and her brother are playing outside.

The man leads Janey into some bushes, where it's clear they have sex, though the act isn't described on the page. Then the books shifts into second person, in which the "you" addressed to the reader is trying to save a small unnamed child who has drowned. The prose is focused and determined, going through the ordeal of performing CPR on a child, but is as emotionally detached as it is detailed. The reader is meant to understand that this is Janey's extremely traumatized way of telling the reader that her little brother drowned and she tried to save him by performing CPR, but she was unable to resuscitate him.

Near the end of the book, on page 80, Lynn drew my attention to some lines I had clearly misread. It is a scene in which 12-year-old Janey is interacting with her mother, and then describing her mother's perfume and makeup for the reader, but the narrative quickly changes direction:

"All her things were laid out there before the mirror. I touched them, the thick creams in jars, tissues blotted red with colour. I unstopped the bottle of her fragrance and the sharp, sweet smell came up at me again, adult.

'Come here, honey...'

Her things were warm to the touch. The creams, the lotions. I could spread them on my own skin.

'Don't be shy...'

It was just once at first, letting myself be taken, then more times, over and over until it was me myself going back for more. Leaving my family, leaving my little brother playing while the tides in the river were rising."



I had completely failed to understand that this text was telling the reader that Janey had begun having sex with the adult man who first crept into her bedroom at night, that they had engaged in sexual intercourse many times, and that was why Janey chose to have sex with him on the day her brother drowned.

Lynn said that this adult man must have been grooming Janey for sex, but the extent of his manipulations of Janey are limited to the passage I've quoted above. I don't think that text is being clear about this man's predatory behavior and rape of a child; instead, the narrative focuses on Janey's choice to have sex with him of her own volition.

While I understand that many rape victims do engage in this type of thinking -- psychologically, it is untenable to many people to have no control over their lives and be purely victimized by other people, and the human mind prefers to think we have control in situations where we really had none -- as a reader, I don't get any sense of Janey's victimization from this text. From an objective distance, i.e. as a thinking adult reading this book, I know that Janey is twelve and that this man was a pedophile and a rapist, but the first-person protagonist narrating this tale is the voice of a legally-adult woman who is telling the reader that she "chose to have sex" with this man on the day that her brother died. There is a disconnect going on in the narrative, and it feels like deliberate obfuscation.

I can understand grooming, pedophilia, and rape, but none of those terms are used in this book, and if Lynn hadn't pointed that specific passage out to me after I had finished the book, I would have assumed this adult man had just shown up to rape Janey, and while he was raping her, Janey's little brother drowned.

Knowing that Janey chose to have sex with this adult man more than once adds to my understanding that she would probably blame herself even more for her brother's death, but this novel is not about the aftermath of Jim's drowning at all. The book does not discuss matters of grief, blame, shame, or guilt. The author chose for the natural environment to express to the reader that Janey is traumatized, and shortly after the reader learns Janey was unable to revive her drowned brother, the book ends. Janey finishes narrating her story by returning to the same type of storytelling she began the book with, in which she and her brother are playing at the lake again, before he died:

"In rain we could take off our clothes and walk down the beach and into the lake in one continuous gliding movement. There was no telling where land ended, waves began. Sand and water dissolved into each other, blotted in mist. Nothing else existed on those days except two children. Watch them. Two with the whole beach to themselves, the whiteness of cloud and water swirling at their feet as they dance, round and around, round and around... With each turn becoming smaller, further away, smaller and smaller in the distance until you can't see them at all." (page 95)

If this type of storytelling and focus on nature-as-metaphor for a character's emotional landscape sounds like a good read to you, then you should check out this book.

Personally, I did not enjoy this novel at all, and I would have DNF'd after a few pages if I hadn't agreed to buddy-read this book with my friend. I'm glad that I finished the book only because I enjoyed talking about the novel with her, and I appreciated that she was able to tell me about the movie and how it differs from the book. Aside from that enjoyable conversation experience, I found this book utterly pointless.