Nicky is an overworked legal professional with few strong relationships—the result of childhood trauma linked to her parents’ chronic deceptions and eventual divorce. When her partner confronts her on her emotional distance, Nicky knows it’s time to dig up her old journals and confront the past, reliving a powder-keg of experience as a teen stuck with her parents on a mostly uninhabited island.
In BENEATH THE WILD FIG TREE, Fiona Preston immediately grips readers with the strength of her prose. Told with a calm, confident specificity, the text moves smoothly from the vibrant scenic beauty of Oceania to the stark emotionality of its human inhabitants. Strongly rooted in an island mentality and framed by the open water, the prose paints lively images of “the frisky ocean” with its “filigree of surf lacing Wedding Cake Island” shimmering under “a thin peel of moon.” That descriptive power is employed to frame Nicky’s emotional journey as well; as she clears boxes out of a parent’s basement, she reflects, “This is the thing about being an Only—you are the wrack line along which parental flotsam gathers.” But the plot is also dotted with arresting moments captured in plain, hard language, as when Bert the fisherman “[throws] entrails into the sea. Against the wide blue, they were as shocking as a slap across the face.”
BENEATH THE WILD FIG TREE is notable for its descriptive power, but also for its deftness in handling its core thematic material. The relationship with the natural world is particularly fascinating. Rejecting a Gothic relation between violent emotional states and the violence of nature, BENEATH THE WILD FIG TREE typically contrasts the pettiness and foibles of its characters with the rugged, immense beauty of the island they inhabit. But the text simultaneously prevents an easy identification of nature as infinite, eternal, or all-powerful; characters include scientists who recognize the early signs of climate change and indigenous people who recall different modes of coexistence with the land, and both groups reflect on the impact humans have had on nature. At times these ideas can feel strained (Len, a young indigenous man suspicious of Nicky’s family, delivers some blunt dialogue bordering on preachy), but the overall thematic structure is satisfying and effective—as acute emotional upheavals in Nicky’s life occur alongside incremental changes to age-old rhythms of the water and the land.
Viewed broadly, the pacing is slow, as is to be expected for an introspective novel about relationships between difficult parents and their adult children; but readers will find that the pace seems to slow further in the last third, when most pieces are on the board and moving in predictable ways. There are also some relationships and plot-lines that feel unresolved: the aforementioned Len, for instance, and Nicky’s partner (who instigates the entire plot by questioning her ability to commit to their relationship) both seem to glance off the narrative and disperse. However, this hardly detracts from the overall mastery of both the core thematic structure and the glittering, fluid language in which the narrative is rendered. Preston’s BENEATH THE WILD FIG TREE is a wild and honest read.
Rich with careful observations of natural beauty, Fiona Preston’s BENEATH THE WILD FIG TREE is a compassionate tale of children reckoning with their parents’ humanity.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader