Facing up to the world without adult support is present in Greek myths and remains a key theme in authors from Anna Burns to Douglas Stuart and Rachel Kushner Over the past few years, I’ve been preoccupied with stories of children fending for themselves, raising each other, embodying cultural and familial values when the adults in their lives cannot. It is there in the Greek myths: the child Iphigenia offering herself as a sacrifice in the face of her father and a mob baying for her blood, or Antigone covering her brother’s body with dust, enacting the burial rituals demanded by the gods when those around her are blinded by revenge or fear. It persists in contemporary stories of children’s resistance, survival and empathy in the midst of addiction, abuse, war. These children, I realise, are constructs, symbols of what we have sacrificed, our effort to compensate for what we lost or are in the process of losing. At the start of my novel, A Crooked Tree_,_ the 15-year-old narrator’s younger sister is put out of the car on a dark road. The other children look back and know that something terrible will happen; when it does, they will try to shoulder the burden alone. I found myself returning to this idea, the solidarity of youth, how children shield adults and each other without fully grasping the external forces threatening them. Continue reading...
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