Review: When God was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman

Review:    
Why do good things happen to bad people? For some of us, this is one of life’s big questions, bigger perhaps than those all-stars: What makes Iago evil? How can a country justify firing both missiles and schoolteachers? The undeserved job promotion, the bequest without cause, the random assigning of accolades or attention: when unmerited rewards are doled out to others, some of us are capable of descending into decades of moping.

 

More reviews from the Book Review's Summer Reading special issue. Thus it’s refreshing to read a book that causes us to ask that question’s obverse — the more traditional, Why do bad things happen to good people? Such a book is Sarah Winman’s wonderful, darkly comic first novel, “When God Was a Rabbit.” Starting in England during the 1960s and ’70s, then moving on to New York before and after 9/11, the book is primarily the story of its English narrator and heroine, Elly, and in particular her intense and loving relationships with her brother, Joe, and her very strange best friend, Jenny Penny. The misfortunes heaped on all three are outsize and seemingly never-ending. Job, in comparison, may have gotten off easy. 

The troubles begin when Elly’s grandparents die in a bus crash, sending her mother into a long and deep depression. Then Elly learns that she was the result of an unplanned pregnancy and starts to ask a lot of questions about her creator. 

“If this God couldn’t love me,” she resolves, “then it was clear I’d need to find another one that could.” This new divine entity is encountered some time later, after she tells her brother that she’s been sexually abused by their neighbor, Mr. Golan. “I’ll get you a proper friend,” her brother declares, as he holds her “in the darkness, as defiant as granite.” The new friend Joe finds for his sister turns out to be a Belgian hare, a pet she names “God,” who sometimes talks to her. Although Joe swears never to reveal Elly’s dark secret about their neighbor, it turns out to be mere prelude to total eclipse: the mentally disturbed Mr. Golan (who has lied about being a Holocaust survivor) commits suicide. And we’re only up to Page 27, kids!
Remarkably, “When God Was a Rabbit” never feels melodramatic or unkind to its characters. Much of this has to do with Winman’s mastery of tone: the narration is dry-eyed but glinting. Of Jenny Penny and her vagabond mother’s home, Winman writes, “They lived in a temporary world . . . that could be broken up and reassembled as easily and as quickly as Lego. Fabric hung from most walls in staggered strips, and around the door frame was a pattern of flowered handprints in pinks and reds that in the dingy light looked like the bloodied hands of a crime scene searching for an exit.” 

Winman simultaneously captures the occasionally overwrought self-consciousness of childhood and gently satirizes it. Young Elly quotes Nietzsche at the family dinner table and auditions for the school Nativity play with a monologue about needing money for an abortion and gin. The proceedings are also leavened by the fact that the supporting characters fare much better than the children. Elly’s parents win a lot of money in the football pools, allowing the family to relocate to a huge house in Cornwall. Elly’s lesbian aunt, Nancy, meets with much approbation, both as a film actress and as the family’s unofficial guardian angel.
Though “When God Was a Rabbit” is studded with era-specific references like the Tet Offensive and the shooting of John Lennon, Winman is, with the exception of a 9/11 plotline late in the book, ultimately less interested in historical resonance than in developing complicated relationships between believable characters. This is the kind of book in which a husband, on learning that his sister has consummated a longtime crush on his wife by kissing her, responds: “At last! At least we’ve got that out of the way.” Such moments give the book the feel of real life, which may cause the reader to be caught unawares, as I was, by its heart-rending conclusion. 

Winman has an authorial tendency to pick at life’s proverbial scabs. But while her plot traffics heavily in grim incident, she maintains a winning proportion of whimsy throughout. At the very least, she’s created the most amusing and emotionally satisfying work of rabbit deism to come down the pike in a long time. I give it five carrots.