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Birth. “A detaching, a loosening of something, then the pain of it.” A small, curled and crinkled creature is wrested from that pain. But then, instead of the long-awaited cry of a newborn: silence.
This is the background of Anna Goldreich’s highly accomplished, calmly devastating first novel The Leveret, a book that asks us to see late miscarriage as the death it feels like for many mothers. Since this miscarriage, six months ago, Clare has felt everyone, including her partner Phoebe, impatiently expecting her to get on with her life. But she remains floored by loss, stuck waiting for that first cry.
In a drastic attempt at change, the couple has moved to a cottage in the rural village where Phoebe grew up. Phoebe is busy helping her farmer parents with the lambing while Clare sits in the house day after day, failing to eat. Pregnancy had been the first time Clare had developed a sense of herself as a real person with a physical body – not just the “floating head” she’d conceived herself to be. The determined physicality of the growing baby had pulled her into a more fleshy awareness of herself. Now she finds herself unreal again – until she discovers an abandoned baby hare under a hedge.
Goldreich writes the scene as a second birth, full of the pulsating life that the first birth lacked. Clare reaches through bramble thorns, “and through the pain, through the tearing, there is softness. My hand over a head, fingers spread out on a back … Her. Pulling her up from the undergrowth, though the space I have opened for her, bringing her out to meet me.” Like the stillborn baby that she nuzzled in the hospital, Clare finds herself licking the hare’s face clean with her tongue, and feels pulled back into life.
It’s an extraordinary scene, written with absolute conviction, and from this point Goldreich succeeds in making the moments between Clare and the baby hare she names Isla eerily moving, even as they become more disturbing. Goldreich keeps three simultaneous possibilities in play for the reader: the hare as a symptom of mental illness; the hare as a desperate but uncannily sane attempt at self-cure on Clare’s part; the hare as a means to access the ultimate truth that we are all creatures in need of contact with the earth. For weeks, the leveret sleeps in Clare’s arms and is carried around in a sling. Then Isla becomes wilder, and Clare desperately clings to the delusion that these are mere rebellious antics, trapping the hare in a domesticity it can’t survive as she tracks Isla’s changing height on the doorframe and talks about her mother as Isla’s “granny”.
The Leveret is a slight book in some ways. Goldreich attempts to make it polyphonic by alternating chapters from Clare and Phoebe, but the sections in Phoebe’s voice don’t take flight. There’s a suggestion that Phoebe doesn’t share the kind of linguistic eloquence Clare thinks with – that she may, indeed, not think verbally at all. This presents a literary challenge of a kind many writers have grappled with; Phoebe’s love for Clare is all the more affecting for being haltingly expressed, but the frequent line breaks in these sections feel weakly uncertain. Nonetheless, Goldreich is so astonishingly good at bringing both the original miscarriage and Clare’s relationship with the hare to visceral life that this is ultimately rather a triumphant first novel. The need for new models of our relationship to nature animates so much writing today, and Goldreich’s approach here is mischievous and elegantly undogmatic.
Ultimately, it’s up to Phoebe to claim Clare back for human love. The book leaves it ambiguous as to whether Clare has saved the hare’s life or blighted its chances; but Isla has restored to Clare some of the physical reality that motherhood had promised, and it may be that the very failure of the project with Isla is part of that. In a moment of extremity, Phoebe lets out “a strange cry from the depths of some poor creature, a hoarse sound, cutting through the wind”, allowing for a moving realisation of the mammalian physicality still possible in the love between Clare and Phoebe.
