Imagined afterlife of father’s love for a daughter

This beautiful novel tells a simple story of a heartbroken father’s apocalyptic grief at the death of his only child, his beloved 13-year-old daughter. While the subject matter might be off-putting the book itself is as fantastic as it is grim.

Charles Crosby is a landscape gardener whose world crashes down around him when his daughter is killed while cycling home from the seaside to her home in the small town of Enon in Massachusetts.

Charles cannot cope with the loss of Kate, and his wife leaves him after their daughter’s death. All of this is told in the opening lines of the book. The rest is Charles’s scarifying emotional journey through grief, physical pain, drug addiction and recovery.

Harding makes this story sing. Though it is only his second novel, his first, Tinkers, was the winner of the Pulitzer prize in 2010.

Harding’s central character has an imagination that wanders across the landscape of Enon with a terrifically alive sense of the history of the place, where it is believed that Sarah Good, who was sentenced to death in the 17th century witch trials in Salem, is buried. Charles Crosby says he loved his daughter totally and that as long as she lived the world was love but once she died his life became a nightmare.

As the physical integrity of his life deteriorates the landscape gardener’s mind becomes a wild and unkempt territory.

In one of the most remarkable passages in a stunningly well-sustained novel he begins to wonder if his dead daughter will encounter the dead Sarah Good in the netherworld: “… the woods of Enon are full of very old unmarked graves and hers may well be among them, along with the bones of animals and citizens: sheep and dogs, fathers and brothers, oxen and horse, mothers and aunts, pigs and chickens, sons and daughters, anonymous cats and owls, Puritans and Indians, unnamed infants, getting their bones mixed in the currents of soil and groundwater, migrating beneath the foundations of our houses and the golf courses, trading ribs and teeth and shins and knuckles, commuting under baseball diamonds and the beds of streams, snagging up on roots and rocks, shelves of granite and seams of clay.”

If the book had merely tracked the physical degradations of this bereft father it would have been bleak indeed, but the visceral dreams are so alive and pulsing with verbal energy the book becomes a hugely empathetic act of human engagement.

Everything has its place in the novel and is given enough by the writer to more than justify being there, whether it is the account of going into the wood with his daughter as a child and the birds landing on their hands to peck seeds, or Charles’s own childhood when he travelled to a fascinating old house in Enon to attend his grandfather fixing a wonderful old clock.

Harding describes the world as “this awful miracle of a planet”. With a thoroughgoing intellect and a perfectly tuned emotional register, the novelist has responded to the world with an awful miracle of a book.