The Poison Tree

Neither of us has been here for over a decade, but I can still drive this street, anticipate those lights, make these gear changes, on autopilot. I could do it with my eyes shut. For a reckless second, I’m tempted to try, close my eyes shut and lock the wheel on a right curve. But I make the double turn into Queenswood Lane wide-eyed and unblinking. The noise of the city falls away as we enter the secret sliver of wildwood, where ancient trees muffle the sirens and screeches of the street and the half-hidden houses occupy a dark green private universe, cushioned by money as much as by trunk and bough and leaf. I drive carefully between the expensive cars, their side-view mirrors tucked into their bodies in case someone unfamiliar with the road drives too quickly and knocks into one. But I am more familiar with this lane than any other road, including the one I grew up on and the one I live on now. It’s the setting for most of my memories and all of my nightmares. (pg. 6)

The Poison Tree, a debut novel by freelance journalist Erin Kelly starts with an unknown woman receiving a phone call in the middle of the night. The phone call was obviously upsetting, sending the woman frantically out into her car still wearing her pajamas and slippers. As she careens down the road, we learn little about her reasons for doing what she is doing. The author gives a great sense of foreboding and urgency ending with an ambiguous passage:

It suddenly feels very hot inside the car. My hands are sweating inside my gloves, my eyes are dry, and my tongue is stick to the roof of my mouth. I have given up so much and done so many terrible things already for the sake of my family that I can only keep going. I do not know what is going to happen to us. I am frightened, but I feel strong. I have the strength of a woman who has everything to lose.  (pg. 3)

This becomes the central theme of the novel – Is there a difference between responsibility and love? And what will you do to protect the ones you love? How far are you willing to go? Not just the love between a parent and a child, but also the love between a man and a woman, the love between siblings. Many of the characters in this novel (both minor and major) make choices based on their feelings of responsibility and love for other people. Not everyone will agree with these choices but Kelly does a good job of not moralizing what her characters are doing.

We learn that the woman is Karen, a translator who ten years ago befriended a bohemian drama student named Biba. Biba has a brother, Rex who, in the present, has just been released from prison for an unnamed violent crime. Karen spends the summer after she graduates from college in Rex and Biba’s house bordering on one of London’s primeval forests. Karen feels alive in Biba’s presence, “…I felt as though I were being read and interpreted for the first time, unfolded and examined like a map left in a drawer for so long that its creases and pleats come permanently to describe their own typography. It was at once, unsettling and reassuring.” (pg. 29). The novel explains how the relationship between these three individuals developed and hanging over the narrative at all times is this “crime” – an ever present “Poison Tree”.

Kelly alternates between the past and the present with Karen describing both that one summer, how she and Rex became lovers, Biba’s unfettered personality and learning more about Rex and Biba’s complicated past and the present integrating Rex back into her life on the coast where she lives quietly with her daughter Alice. We know a crime as been committed but it takes a long time to understand exactly what really happened. Just when I thought I might have a glimmer, Kelly would incorporate another small tidbit into the narrative and I would be back at ground zero. And for those of you who read the last page or two of a book, doing so will not help you here. As a reader, I got the sense that I was walking through that primeval forest, cautiously stepping through the trees over uneven ground, not quite sure where I was going.

At the end of the novel, Kelly quotes William Blake’s “A Poison Tree”. The poem is very fitting to the book and after finishing, you truly can see why the poem fits and where the title of the book comes from. There are brief echoes to the poem scattered throughout the novel, “I suddenly felt hot and suffocated for reasons that had nothing to do with the closed windows. The first real shaft of sun brought a new heat that filtered through the ivy that grew against the window. The leaves pressed against the pane, poison-bottle green, the size and shape of human hearts.” (pg. 182). When I was finished I still was still left wondering – what would I do to protect my family? Is there a little poison in all of us?

I must admit that at first I struggled with this book as I felt the novelist was a little heavy-handed with her metaphors and similes. However, as I read along, the writing got tighter, almost like we were spiraling inward to the center closer and closer to understanding. This feeling I had certainly attests to Kelly’s skill. I look forward to seeing what she comes up with next – I think she can only get better especially with such a fine beginning.

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