'Born on a Thursday and so fated to his wanderings'
Written: Jan 24 '06
Product Rating:
Pros: excellent (on occasion, lyrical) writing, superb characterization, very engaging protagonist
Cons: unremitting progression of unfortunate events may be too depressing for some; the ending
The Bottom Line: A strangely moving story of a family struggling to keep body and soul together through abject poverty and personal tragedy between the World Wars.
jc_hall's Full Review: Sonya Hartnett - Thursday's Child
Review of Thursday's Child by Sonya Hartnett
Harper Flute is almost seven when she begins to recount her tale. Mam is about to deliver the latest baby, so Harper is asked to take Tin, her younger brother, away from under the feet of the grown ups. But the land by the creek turns out to be treacherous and Tin (short for Augustin) gets swallowed up in a mudslide. Even though he’s eventually rescued, he ends up forever marked by this incident.
‘Born on a Thursday and so fated to his wanderings’, Tin begins to dig under their shanty house. Even though Mam demurs, Da doesn’t stop him, not even when Tin stops coming up for food or sleep. Da thinks Tin is born to dig, and soon Tin is as good as lost to the world above the ground.
Mam and elder sister Audrey are busy with the sick baby Caffy, so Harper and Devon, her elder brother, try to help out. Their land is exhausted, but Da doesn’t fancy himself a farmer anyway, so snaring rabbits keep them, barely, from the maws of hunger. With so many mouths to feed and the Depression rolling their way, soon they will find themselves even colder, hungrier, and more threadbare then before.
When the chickens and their cows are stolen, and their shanty collapses due to Tin’s prodigious digging, Da sinks to a new low and hits the bottle. So when the odious hog farmer, Vandery Cable, offers Audrey a position as housekeeper, she reckons that might well be the only way to put food on the table. Apart from Da, no-one wants Audrey to go, especially not Devon and Harper. But Izzy, Audrey’s beau, still hasn’t proposed, so even though Audrey herself is more than a little wary of the offensive Cable, she decides to take on the job.
By this time, Tin has become a wild and feral creature, the stuff of myth and neighbourhood legend. People report sightings of him far and wide, as he emerges from the exits of the maze of tunnels he has excavated. The family hasn’t seen or heard from Tin in ages, not even Harper, but she’s soon to have a run-in with him that will leave her heart hammering in her chest.
This is a rather unusual coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Great Depression. To be frank, the series of unfortunate events that befall the Flute family is really quite depressing. Nevertheless, the story is so well-written and Harper is such an engaging protagonist and Tin such a strange and interesting little boy that I kept reading just to find out what’s going to happen to the two of them.
I particularly like Harper’s musings, which can be quite lyrical but understated at the same time. An example is her description of how she felt at her last encounter with Tin; it made my eyes smart with tears.
It was Tin, who was mythical, and he looked just that way. He looked nothing like the boy he was supposed to be, ten going on eleven. He seemed to hover above the earth somehow, the curious glow of his flesh illuminating him. I would not have been surprised if wings had opened up behind him…… he looked into the room at us. He looked first at Mam, then Da, then at Audrey, then me. When his eyes settled on mine I felt something inside me shake free, and go to him. I didn’t give it—he wanted it, and it went to him. Then he smiled, only slightly, but enough so we agreed, afterward, that we had seen it done. With that he turned and vanished…
The other characters are all well-drawn, from Mam and Da and Devon and Audrey to the helpful neighbours and the villainous Cable. My only criticisms include a plot-hole near the end, when Tin is suggested to be some place he couldn’t possibly be. Also, Harper is almost 12 by now, but she’s still acting like a 7-year-old, both physically (riding on her Da’s shoulders or curling up in Mam’s lap) and emotionally (not understanding what’s ailing Audrey). And as the author herself observes, the ending’s a little pat and fairy-tale-ish, considering all that down-to-earth suffering that’s gone before.
Other than that, it’s a good story well told, and just for getting to know Harper and Tin, I’m glad to have picked up ‘Thursday’s Child’.
Sonya Hartnett is the author of several acclaimed novels—the first written when she was just thirteen—and the recipient of many prestigious awards in her native Australia. She says that Tin and his tunnelling had their origin in ants: “I was living at the time in two rooms, just pacing back and forth, back and forth, as I watched an entire summer of ants excavating under my house. One day it occurred to me that they probably had a huge palace under there. And that’s when I started to think about ways of taking your existence into your own hands—of how, if the space around you was not big enough, you might just dig out some more.”
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