Lumen Winter 2023 - Flipbook - Page 36
Childhood –
a survival story
A Review of Shannon Burns’ Childhood, by Jennifer Rutherford and Brian Castro
Shannon Burns’ memoir Childhood traces
the bewilderment of a young boy as he
comes to terms with the struggle to become
himself in a world without the emotional or
physical stability of any dependable other.
Moving from childhood incomprehension
to adult clarity, it haunts and unsettles our
imagination as the reader follows the boy’s
painful journey. Childhood’s literary style
is rhythmic, moving effortlessly from the
outside world to the inside world and back
again in short sentences. Less, as they say,
is more, but there is nothing “more-or-less”
in Burns’ writing. It is as bare and hard as
granite. Courageous and frank, it does not
hide beneath the soft mantle of “storytelling”, but it is compulsive reading.
The narrator of Childhood remembers
little of a childhood in which his parents
have only three ways of being: “angry and
stupid; stoned and stupid; or angry, stoned
and stupid.” What he does remember is
vague, the details uncertain. Like the boy’s
acquired habit of retreat and evasion, his
memories are good at hiding, and yet
the memoir traces the moments of a boy
becoming himself with forensic detail. In a
style stripped of rhetoric or affect, the reader
is held hostage to the lived experience of
memory-trouble; of how crystalline detail
and contextual confusion co-exist.
The boy’s survival requires living a double
life, with his authentic self permanently in
hiding, but who can that self be – stained
as it is by the guilt of familial association?
Watching the near rape of a girl, he becomes
an accomplice by association; seeing his
father’s sexual predation of his sister, he is
stained by kinship to that behaviour. The
endless physical punishment he receives
confirms his guilt, which is always what a
forlorn child brings down upon himself.
Alone with his parents (“one of them
terrifying and half-mad, the other a pervert
36
THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, insider and
outsider co-existing in the fight for loyalties
from which the reader is not exempt.
Dr Shannon Burns was awarded his PhD in
Literature from the University of Adelaide in
2011. He is an Adelaide-based author, critic
and member of the JM Coetzee Centre for
Creative Practice at the University.
Adjunct Professor Jennifer Rutherford is an
author, critic and former Director of the
JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.
Adjunct Professor Brian Castro is an author,
scholar and founding director of the JM
Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.
Shannon Burns
who fills him with fury and disgust”),
possibilities for identification fall away until
he is living far removed from himself.
The painful heart of this book is its quiet
and undemonstrative depiction of becoming
oneself, when one has no other to imitate
or a standard by which to measure oneself
– thus one can only signal distress through
defiant gestures, thuggish bullying, and
dissociation. This could be a book about
the numerous ways a child can turn into a
sociopath, about a boy becoming a thug, but
instead we witness the boy slowly building
an ideational fortress within himself in which
to mobilise an ethical self. How can we
explain the complexities of character?
Unrelentingly stark, Childhood speaks in
whispers and we have to listen closely. There
is great character in the writing and the
writing itself becomes a character, so that
we know it as a quiet friend, unassumingly
authentic and modest, astonishing in the
rawness of its wounds, but surprisingly
intact in its narratorial control. Childhood
re-makes the memoir-form like Mark
Childhood, by Shannon Burns, paperback
272pp, ISBN 9781922330789 (Text
Publishing)
We have five signed copies of Shannon’s
memoir to give away - contest details
page 44.
