Delia Owens (2019) Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing is Delia Owens’ debut novel. A New York Times Bestseller and a Reece’s Book Club pick. Although this is Owen’s first novel, she is also a bestselling author of non-fiction as a ‘wildlife scientist’ in Africa. She lives in Idaho. Write what you know. It’s no great leap to imagine the young Kya, ‘the Marshgirl’. Her brutal coming-of-age marked by oneness and appreciation of the natural world not being far from what Owens’ imagination roams. She’s not preaching a truth, like Rachel Carson Silent Spring, but highlighting as our blue world turns green, that when it’s gone it’s gone, and we will follow.

Kya, an isolated wee girl, growing into a beautiful adolescent woman shunned by white and polite society, grows inward and outward into the natural marsh life of 1960’s America, much the same time Carson was preaching to the unconverted about the dangers of glyphosates, and faced a conservative backlash.

Listen to the poetry of the opening lines of the Prologue to get a feel for the world in which Kya lives and breathes and has her being.  

‘1969

Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into sky. Slow-moving creaks wander, carrying the orbs of the sun with them to the sea, and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace—as though not built to fly—against the roar of a thousand snow geese.

…On the morning of October 30, 1969, the body of Chase Andrews lay in the swamp, which would have absorbed it silently, routinely.’

Novels ask questions of the reader. Who or what (if anything) killed Chase Adams. Listen to his name and you’ll know he’s one of those blessed all-American boys whom no man can touch.

The structure of the novel dances between Kya—her impoverished upbringing 1952, when she was six, and her Ma left the family—and that day in 1969, when Chase’s body lay in the marsh.

The meet-cute, when plot fills in the gaps in time. A map orientates the reader. Kya’s shack on the marshland. She stayed with her father before he too disappeared. There’s always somebody leaving her is an existential truth. The Reading Cabin, worse than a shack, but it has a roof. Kya is a marsh girl, she can’t read. Not until Tate learned her. The Reading Cabin and a meat-cute of will she won’t she, but we know happiness has no fixed point. Point Beach faces the sea. Jumpin’s Bait and Gas, a jetty and lifeline to young Kya. Colored Town, blacks are hidden away from the affluence of Barkley Cove, where Chase Adams lives like a young god. Lastly, on the map, Fire Tower.

Fire Tower is the loaded gun pointed at Barkley Cove.

‘Sheriff Jackson said, “Vern, there’s more to do here, but it doesn’t feel right. Chase’s wife and folks don’t know he’s passed.”’   

Jackson has to dig deeper. The timelines of his investigation and Kya’s dalliance with Chase have to twist into a knot that holds true.

We have a love story that’s a lust story. Kya reads about ‘sneaky fuckers’, which made her laugh, a technical term for toads that croak what they’re not.

Then we have a love story, which is a love story. Romeo and Juliet of the Marsh. Tate and Kya. Kya and Tate. She’s fifteen and he’s eighteen. They’re so much in love it can’t be statutory rape. But Tate leaves her purity intact. Because he’s the good guy. The reader figures quests and questions will be asked. But in the long narrative arc the purity of both will be rewarded. The job of Owens as novelist, and not as naturalist, is to twist the knife.

She does a fine job. The murder mystery is resolved. True love runs true. The good people of Barkley Cove, who shunned and stigmatised Marsh Trash and Marsh Girl, are themselves put on trial. It’s not J.B. Priestley, An Inspector Calls. More a kinship with Harper Lee, To Kill a Mocking Bird, and set around the same time.

Where the Crawdads Sing does indeed sing. Another novel with a female protagonist. An international bestseller that questions the natural order of America’s addiction to destruction of (marsh)land in the creation of wealth for very few. Mya, Marsh Girl, shuns those that would drain the swamp, which provides sanctuary for more life that we could get down low and get to know in one lifetime. But that’s fiction for all the Trumpets out there. The rich-man, poor-girl plot doesn’t lay an egg, but neither does it have enough grace to fly. Now there’s a movie. Books are a higher form of pond life. Read on.