Bobby Palmer’s debut Isaac and the Egg, about a grief-paralysed widower whose life improves when he meets an ET-like creature, was a big hit. The British author’s second novel also has the flavour of a modern-day fable. What makes it like a fable is not so much the – yes – talking fox, but more the novel’s rhythmic prose and its sense that there can be communication between all living things.
The story centres on the relationship between city-dweller Jack, for whom “finance felt like a calling, the ultimate question to be solved”, and his naturalist father Gerry who never leaves Moles End, the remote and ramshackle country home he shares with Jack’s mother Hazel and sister Charlotte.
We first meet Jack when the finance sector start-up he works for goes bust. He is devastated but has no one to tell. He lived for work, has no friends and little contact with his, to him, depressingly rustic and unambitious family.
Slumping on a park bench to digest the news of his newly unemployed state, Jack becomes aware of a fox, “… an injured fox. A half-dead fox, stalked by crows”. Jack is instrumental in saving the fox via an animal-rescue charity and the fox says “thank you” to him from the back of the rescuer’s van. At that moment, Jack’s sister calls to say their mother has gone missing. He must go home.
This is the set-up that leads him back to the despised Moles End, where he must unravel the puzzle of a missing mother, deal with the hurt feelings of a neglected sister and most crucially face up to the fractured relationship he has with his taciturn father.
It’s a lot. Luckily, if mysteriously, the rescued fox turns up at Moles End shortly after Jack gets there. The fox offers advice, encouragement and occasionally comic relief. He’s a good fox too – think the fox in The Little Prince, but less needy.
The story is told from the points of view of Jack, Gerry, Hazel and the fox, each viewpoint contributing to the picture of how this family ended up so divided. Gerry has early dementia when we meet him. A socially awkward, principled man, Gerry has found all the meaning and success he needs in his family and in the natural world. The wood surrounding Moles End with its owls, foxes and hedgehogs is enough for him. Work and the issue of its relationship to a person’s sense of self is a recurring theme and, unlike Jack, Gerry has the problem sorted: “Gerry … didn’t subscribe to [the] belief that your job should be the measure of your worth.” He’d worked as a greengrocer knowing he was “worth more than any job” but enjoying the “simple pleasure of working with things which he had pulled from the earth”.
Hazel’s story follows her departure from Moles End and goes back to describe her early relationship with Gerry. Both nature lovers, they travelled the world in their Kombi van, settling down only when Jack was born. Her yearning for a later-life adventure is convincingly evoked, as is her enduring love for the fading Gerry. She is well-realised, not solely defined by her family relationships.
The fox connects the stories of the father and the son. Talking animals might not be your thing, but don’t let this particular chatty critter put you off.
The origins and development of the rift between Gerry and Jack are a touch overexplained, causing the story to sag a bit in the middle, but the fox and Hazel’s travels inevitably return to liven things up. Small Hours is a moving story about the redemptive power of nature.
Small Hours by Bobby Palmer (Headline, $37.99) is out now.
