Patricia Tyrrell has self-published two novels, both of which were shortlisted for major prizes. The Promised Land was runner-up for the Sagittarius Prize for a first novel by someone over the age of 60, and The Reckoning was a contender for the Encore Award. I am happy to declare an interest here as, along with Mark Amory, the literary editor of these pages, I was one of the Encore judges. The book didn’t win, but Tyrrell has gone on gaining admirers, including a major publishing house who have now brought her into mainstream print.
This remarkable novel lifts off from a story of archetypal depth: a stolen child, a murder, a man seeking redemption and a couple whose grief has frozen them over. It is narrated by the teenage Cate, who was abducted from a campsite in the American West when she was three. The man who took her was a drifter called Les, who has brought her up since, apparently successfully. They camp in abandoned shacks and drive into town to pick up food stamps and welfare cheques: there’s no school, but no television either. Then Cate does something which determines Les to return her to her mother, not as simple an idea as it might seem. Tyrrell sets aside the two major dramas of the book to concentrate in each case on the aftermath.
In Cate, she has a storyteller who is poised on the brink of the adult world — able to watch and listen, but not yet ready to act. She is brave, gauche, mortified and muddled in true adolescent style. She is also able to trace a pattern of tragic compulsion being acted out by people who are neither bad nor good.
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