"Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens

Kya, also known as Marsh Girl, is an outsider in the remote North Carolina swamp town, so, when a local sporting hero is found dead, she gets the blame.

It's a romantic novel (girl meets her first love, he breaks her heart, she takes up with the bad boy, he abuses her and she has to find herself in time for the final reel) mingled with a murder mystery culminating in a classic courtroom battle mingled with a biology text.

This is a book which has been adored by many readers. I didn't hate it. There are moments of well-crafted and even lyrical prose: "Kya stood and walked into the night, into the creamy light of a three-quarter moon. The marsh's soft air fell silklike around her shoulders. The moonlight chose an unexpected path through the pines, laying shadows about it in rhymes. She strolled like a sleepwalker as the moon pulled herself naked from the waters ..." (Ch 23)

But I couldn't believe in the motivations of the characters and I found the dialogue clunky.

I think the fundamental problem with this book is that the plot drives the characters rather than the characters driving the plot:

• In order to be suspected (without evidence) of the murder of Chase, so setting up a 'To Kill a Mockingbird' type courtroom battle, the protagonist has to be an outsider: the character of 'Marsh Girl' is evocative and mythic. She is, in effect, an updated Tarzan. 
• And just as Burroughs made Tarzan an aristocrat to avoid the 'primitive' stereotyping, so 'Marsh Girl' must be hugely intelligent: she starts to learn to read from Biology textbooks in less than a year; her first sentence, puzzled out on the day she learns A, B, C, is: "There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot." Yeah, right. Credible. 
• Of course, like Tarzan, Kya is perfectly at one with nature. She also spends large parts of her wandering around the marshes quoting poetry.
• To be a properly mythic outsider, she also needs to be fundamentally alone: which is why she is deserted by her Mother and no less than four siblings ("What she wondered was why no one took her with them" thinks Kya in Chapter 2; even her adored brother Jodie leaves her, abandoning his adored little sister to an abusive father because ... well, because the story needs this to happen) and her father (who disappears, presumably dead). When her boyfriend, the ever-loving Tate, leaves her without a word, the whole abandonment thing becomes utterly unbelievable.

The dialogue is clunky. Although some of the ignorant characters speak in dialect (Pa, the lawmen, the black citizens), Kia herself, as befits an autodidact who hardly ever talks to anyone, mostly speaks in standard American English, well punctuated and grammatically correct. Her spoken prose is invariably well formed and sometimes sounds as if she is quoting from the textbooks with which she learned to read: 

• "In nature - out yonder where the crawdads sing - these ruthless-seeming behaviors actually increase the mother's number of young over her lifetime, and thus her genes for abandoning offspring in times of stress are passed on to the next generation. And on and on. It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in whatever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn't be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail." (Ch 34) One might argue that she is merely quoting from an academic text when she says this.
• But not this: "I can't tell you how much I wanted to see you again. This is one of the happiest and yet saddest days of my life." (Ch 34) You can't exactly hear the whooping excitement, or the bitter sorrow in these carefully constructed sentences. 
• And, in a moment of high tension: "I will never live like that - a life wondering when and where the next fist will fall." (Ch 41)

Fundamentally, Kya is one of the current crop of too-good-to-be-true protagonists.

Unusually for me, I saw the film before I read the book. The film is very faithful to the book, the principal difference being that Kya's arrest happens almost at the start of the film and that more of the sheriff's investigation is presented as evidence during the courtroom scenes, which take centre place. The sub-plot about the land tax is given as a motivation for getting published. Beautiful cinematography took the place of the lyrical descriptions. The acting was excellent. But I noted after watching the film that I had doubts about the motivations of the characters; that they were  subservient to the plot, in particular to the creation of the 'Marsh Girl' myth. 

Selected quotes: 

• "Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks." (Ch 1)
• "He had two settings: silence and shouting." (Ch 1)
• "Useless as tits on a boar hawg." (Ch 2)
• "Mostly, the village seemed tired of arguing with the elements and simply sagged." (Ch 2)
• "Barkley Cove served its religion hard-boiled and deep-fried." (Ch 10)
• "Autumn leaves don't fall, they fly." (Ch 17)
• "Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different lights." (Ch 20)
• "Only time male mammals hover is when they're in the rut." (Ch 23)
• "Kya knew it wasn't so much that the herd would be incomplete without one of its deer, but that each deer would be incomplete without her herd." (Ch 41)

Tarzan for millennials.

August 2022; 368 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God