Fault Lines

Fault Lines opens in a hyper-real California where fathers drink beer and belch at the TV, mothers are born-again and stay-at-home and where everyone looks to the beneficent Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. This sunny wonderland is home to Sol, a monstrous six-year-old child brought up to believe that history began with his birth. Sol is, we hope, the last of the line in Nancy Huston’s latest novel, a family saga told in reverse. As we follow first Sol, then his father Randall, his grandmother Sadie and finally GG, the Great-Grandmother, the family secrets are peeled back to reveal a dark core of pain dating back to the Second World War.

Nancy Huston demonstrates a mordant taste for satire in her opening chapter. Sol is a creature whose fictional antecedents lie with The Tin Drum or Midnight’s Children; he is a figure deformed by his age. Sol is anorexic and tyrannical, but his most unnatural quality is his intelligence. Sol understands too much, yet is incapable of processing anything. He follows the war in Iraq via the tabloid news channels, yet mistakes a pornographic website for Fox-style war reportage as he watches fictional scenes of US soldiers raping female Iraqi prisoners. The heightened and satirical tone of Sol’s chapter persuades the reader to look at the present as though it were science-fiction and thus a kind of historical wrong-turning. The following chapters introduce a more realistic tone, pulling at the thread of necessity behind our monstrous present-day.

Each of Fault Lines' chapters is recounted by the characters when they were six years old. At its base is an original sin. GG was one of 200,000 Eastern European children who were taken from their parents by the Nazis and raised by German parents. The scheme was intended to compensate the Reich for its war losses; Nancy Huston’s notes at the close of her novel tell us that only one fifth of these children were returned to their parents. The character GG is found at six and delivered to a convent orphanage. Inevitably, she becomes a distant mother. Sadie, her daughter, learns something of the truth. Her response is two-fold, she becomes an academic specialising in evil while romanticising the state of Israel as a triumph of the good. Sadie marries a Jew, converts and makes Aliyah. Yet as Israel invades Lebanon in 1982, a series of bitter arguments with her less starry-eyed husband tear the family apart. Her six-year-old son, Randall, experiences the war through the perspectives of his parents, as well as through the eyes of a young classmate, a Palestinian-Israeli girl. When Randall’s mother Sadie suffers a terrible road accident, his love for this young girl turns to hatred as he convinces himself that she placed a curse on his family. At every turn, the urge to view history as a series of victories is undermined by the misunderstandings of the six-year-old who will grow up under the new order. Huston’s novel shows how history is made of fault lines and misunderstandings, and is never a seamless sequence of events.