Surrender (review)

Ten-year-old Anwell, overcontrolled son of a dysfunctional family fiercely bent on small-town orthodoxy, meets Finnigan, wild child and troublemaker, and the two form a bond wherein Finnigan will do all the bad things for Anwell, who, now nicknamed Gabriel, will then be freed to do only good things. Finnigan takes to this "packet," as he terms it, with a vengeance, scourging the town for years as an uncaught arsonist, roaming the hills with Gabriel's brutish and untamed dog, Surrender, as his shadow. When Surrender's livestock-killing incurs the wrath of Gabriel's father, Gabriel does his father's bidding and shoots the dog, an action that destroys the already troubled balance between Gabriel and Finnigan and results in tragic violence. Readers may suspect early on that things are not quite as they seem, and in fact they're not: the Manichaean duality of Finnigan and Gabriel is as fallacious as Christian theology would have it, since Finnigan and Gabriel are merely the two parts of Anwell; as Gabriel, he now lies willing himself toward death in order to bring Finnigan back to him. Yet in Hartnett's psychological antipodean Gothic, there's always room for another choking strand of connection, and Finnigan is not only the dark side of Anwell but the projection of Anwell's mentally disabled brother, Vernon, whom Anwell accidentally killed when he was only seven. The coiled intensity of the narrative's inescapable slide toward doom is cold and gripping, made sharply poignant by occasional flashes of the unfulfilled possibilities for joy (seven-year-old Anwell's grief at having to miss longed-for cartoons because of his brother's tantrum, his doubt about the merits of his secret teen friendship with the beautiful Evangeline); the backdrop of the insular small town, with its firm, unstated suspicions of anyone unusual and its blend of pride and fear at the dramatic plague of arson, is painted with crisp, pitiless clarity. Fans of Hartnett's other works and of adult writers such as Flannery O'Connor will enjoy untangling the sinewy threads of this dark story.