And we see another side of her, wild and free in the wilderness he has taught her to love. We see Turtle indoctrinated into the world her father has made for her, naming herself as he, foully, names her, going – sometimes – willingly to his bedroom. To and fro, Tallent and Turtle pull their readers. Then she thinks, get out of this, shit, your mind is rotten and you cannot trust yourself and you do not even know what to believe except that you love him, and everything goes from there.” It arrives heaped with praise from the likes of Stephen King, who calls it a masterpiece “And then she thinks, you’re forgetting what your life is, Turtle, and you can’t forget that and you have to stay close to what is real, because if you ever get out of this it will be because you paid attention and moved carefully and did everything well. She loves it, loves them, and, increasingly dangerously, starts to pull away from her monster of a father. She saves them, lost in the forest bantering unstoppably with each other, they christen her “the future shotgun-toting, chainsaw-wielding queen of post-apocalyptic America”. She’s given a nudge when she stumbles across two high-school boys during her wanderings, and is mesmerised by the glimpse of another life. Turtle, he shows us, both loves and hates her father, and we watch with bated breath as she inches her way towards the possibility of something else. Outside school hours, sometimes in the middle of the night, she takes walks along the coastline – Tallent here entangling the reader in intoxicating descriptions of the natural world, to which Turtle is symbiotically close.
Her father’s focus on a post-apocalyptic survival routine – “It’s no way to raise a child, pretending that the world is going to end, just because you’d prefer it did,” her grandfather tells him – has made her a dab hand at making fires and foraging for food, but she’s a misfit at school, where she brushes away the concerns of a kindly teacher. This is the story of Turtle’s desire to escape, or not, from that life. And he rapes her at night in his bedroom, “where the moon-cast shadows of the alder leaves come in and out of focus on the drywall”.
He taught her to shoot when she was six, in preparation for the end of civilisation. She lives with her father in an overgrown, rotting house in Mendocino.
In prose as lush as the verdant California coastline on which he has set his novel, and which he clearly knows in intimate detail, Gabriel Tallent reveals the hard reality of life for Turtle Alveston. T his debut novel grabs you by the throat and hits you with a swift series of shocks from the word go.
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