The history girl

Ronald Knox, found awake aged four by a nanny, was asked what he was thinking about, and he replied ‘the past’. I thought of this when reading Hunters in the Snow, since the author is so young, and the time-scale of the book so long. This is a truly dazzling first novel. Every paragraph bristles with cleverness and yet it is a warm-hearted book, at times overpoweringly moving.

Its theme is nothing less than the past, and how we view it, and how it affects us. The framework of the story is the young narrator’s relationship with a reclusive, unhappily married grandfather, who is a professional historian. The substance of it, however, is the way that every event in the past has in some way led up to the present. ‘Actual events,’ said Carlyle, ‘are nowise so simply related to each other as parent and offspring are, and every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events.