Forgive me, o blogosphere, for I have been a terrible book blogger. I’m utterly ashamed to admit that although Ananda Braxton-Smith’s Tantony landed on my doorstop some months ago, it has languished unread since then largely due to the fact that I’m a superficial person who judges books by their covers. Now I’m kicking myself for having lost several months in which I could have been recommending this and buying copies for everyone I know. Tantony is one of the most perfectly, painfully beautiful books I’ve read in a long time.

Boson Quirk is half of this world, half of another: he hears voices, dreams of being something else altogether. In many ways he is transcendant, but in others he is deeply, hauntingly human. The Quirks are already looked upon with wariness by the people of Carrick, who see demons and monsters lurking in every shadow, and fear the spread of such, and Boson’s ways are drawing their attention. Boson becomes further and further removed from reality until he is no longer just spiritually removed from the world, but physically as well, becoming subsumed by the very bog that seems to sustain him.

Fermion, Boson’s pragmatic twin sister, seeks answers in the mundane instead, searching amongst the townsfolk for a clue as to what might have happened to her brother. Here, too, superstition rears its head: she hears stories of shades and spirits and curses, and of the generation of “different” children who were exiled for their deformities–deformities that pointed to their moral irregularities. But when Fermion begins to hear voices, voices not unlike those that haunted her brother, she wonders whether she herself is different, and seeks out this lost generation hoping to settle her fears about her brother’s, and possibly her own, affliction as well.

What she finds there upends her moral compass and challenges her way of thinking. What marks someone as “normal” or “different”? Are those things she has long thought of as objective merely a matter of perspective? And where is Fermion positioned herself?

The novel explores these issues sympathetically but in no way tentatively: though Braxton-Smith’s prose is lush, plump and warm, it’s no buffer. Her facility with language results in a completely immersive experience: her sentences are evocative and eerie, and crawl across the page thickly and stirringly, much like the bog they describe. Her unsparing, unapologetic use of the Manx dialect creates a sense of alienation and fantasia, yet it’s familiar enough that her setting feels like a slightly canted version of our own experience. Competing cultural narratives do battle, and the reader is left to determine which is more valid than the other, and our sense of what is right and wrong is incessantly brought to task.

Reminiscent of Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, Tantony is an achingly sincere and hauntingly melancholy exploration of mental illness (or otherness) in the claustrophobic and judgemental environment created by superstition and fear. The setting is utterly believable, the characters true, and the prose is exquisite. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Rating:

With thanks to Black Dog Books (now part of Walker Books) for the review copy

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Other books by Ananda Braxton-Smith: