Thorn Jack by Katherine Harbour

Thorn Jack, by Katherine Harbour, will always be one of my favorite novels, the ones that I admire for a variety of reasons as a writer. Technically, it is near flawless and that's quite remarkable in itself. While very accessible, it accomplishes many things at once, part love story, part family drama, part fairy tale, part phantasmagorical dream, part secret history. It is riddled with symbols and themes, and literary allusions. And that is not all. Fair Hollow, the decadent setting, with it's falling leaves and scented roses, its forbidden woods, and those gorgeous decaying houses haunts the imagination.  On the surface, one could describe this as a simple love story, the tale of a young girl who meets the dark brooding guy, and falls into a dangerous situation, but Thorn Jack moves beyond love into the mythic heart of what it means to be human in a world where death is the final end. Fairies are the metaphor here, although Harbour has given them a world and complexity of their own. Fairies live in the night. In the day, they are nothing, and Harbour may have not deliberately planned it, this deep conflict, this dichotomy between the two, but that is aching heart of this book and it is not only striking but primordial. There is also that outer gaze that I often write of when concerning fairies and their mythology. The center of this story is set around Finn Sullivan and her grief for her sister, Lily Rose. Finn has moved to Fair Hollow, the home of her deceased grandmother, and it is here that she sees Jack for the first time. Jack, as metaphor, is the goblin of Christina Rossetti's mysterious and allegorical tale of sisters tempted by the Other. He is dark, dangerous, and dead. What he wants is not love, but life. The outer gaze gives us a glimpse of how desperate fairies are to be among the living, how fairies use the living, and how the dead really envy those alive and bleeding. Jack, himself, was once human. In Finn, he sees a small part of his human self. The fact that he is conflicted in Finn's seduction is given validity by the outer gaze of his past and what it means to be a "Jack." Harbour excelled here. Otherwise this story would have been too simple. That Finn is drawn to Jack resonates in a young girl, who is grieving the death of both a sister and a grandmother, who is transported from the comforts of home and hearth to the dangerous woods of place and longing. Finn has this ferocious longing to connect to something outside the pain she is feeling. That, in itself, is why this novel works so beautifully. Jack is her catalyst. I don't find their love story sentimental in anyway. Jack's desire for life is an easy opening for the other human desires. Finn's desire for life is much the same. Once the connection is there, it becomes a dangerous road, because Jack is not a living breathing thing, nor is he able to live in the light. At times, he is only a dream, and at times, he is nothing. There's meaning there. Harbour develops it by giving us a complex history of the fairy who seduced Jack into her world and it is here that we are given a retelling of Tam Lin. Unlike other similar tales of good young girls and beautiful dangerous boys, Finn is Team Human. She never wants to go to the Other. Instead, she brings Jack back to life. Of course, the deed requires a heavy price and because Thorn Jack is one of three books in a series, we know that while love is a powerful thing, it cannot fix all problems. There are other elements I adore in this book, the fact that reason is often fixed against madness, instead of the old fashioned good versus evil, the fact that human desires, our personal enclosures and escapes are shown in how the fairies function. However, these are some gorgeous and decadent fairies, so colorful and seductive that I found myself, several times, siding with them emotionally. That's dangerous. Fairy Land is a mad, mad place. No human should want to live there, but I was tempted. I suppose that is the heart of all good fairy stories, the fact that we humans envy the immortal dead in some ways. The latter is another post altogether and Freudian. In closing, I want to add that no matter what happens in this series, Thorn Jack is a perfect standalone book, written in a dreamy descriptive language what gives the outer gaze a life. We see, somewhere at the edge of our vision, the powerful Otherness, so dark and seductive, that we can do nothing but long for it.