Icon: enlarge
Author Dylan Farrow: Hair-raising under-complex
Photo:
Chad Batka / NYT / REDUXPICTURES / laif
Your novel is about courage and the willingness to take risks.
He said how important it was to maintain a sense of justice.
Her story, Dylan Farrow continues in an afterword to her literary debut, is one about the power of words and truth.
When writers provide the interpretation of their work at the same time, that is usually not a good sign.
The rush that a good story explains itself is still true today.
Dylan Farrow, the adopted daughter of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, apparently sees it differently.
Perhaps she thought that she hadn't spread her fantasy story about a young woman with magical powers on 413 pages in an understandable way - but those who don't trust their own art don't describe it with such cocky key words.
Perhaps Farrow does not trust her readers to correctly interpret its subtlety.
Her youth novel "Hush - Forbidden Words" is just as little nuanced as a "Funny paperback".
So there is probably a third, more plausible reason for the afterword.
One that has more to do with Farrow's biography than her writing.
The author, Mia Farrow and their son Ronan claim that Woody Allen sexually abused the writer as a child.
Allen denies this, most recently in his autobiography a year ago;
what exactly happened between Farrow and Allen will probably never be cleared up.
Perhaps Farrow wanted to include questions about the abuse allegations in her afterword.
In any case, she makes it clear that she wants to see »Hush« as a parallel to her own family history:
In her childhood and youth, Farrow writes, her family was harassed by a powerful person "who was determined to destroy our lives and our credibility."
But unfortunately the story itself is not a clever or interesting processing of this topic - it is a terrifyingly banal novel.
The focus of »Hush« is the teenage girl Shae, she lives with her mother on the edge of a village in the desolate, sad world of Montane, which is vaguely reminiscent of the Middle Ages.
Rain falls there so rarely that pastures and meadows have long withered away.
And as if hunger, poverty and being a teenager weren't bad enough in and of themselves, Shae also has magical powers that could mean her death sentence: what she embroidered on a piece of cloth comes true.
If she decorates a handkerchief with tulips, the dry earth will bloom.
If she puts a little rabbit on a pillow, it will eventually hop through the steppe.
So ambiguous it hurts
What would provide an invitation to Hogwarts in another fantasy world is dangerous in Montane, because being different is punished in hierarchical society: by the bards, autocratic magicians who roam the country, collect taxes and torture people.
Or a mysterious illness that everyone just calls the "blue death".
Anyone who tells, reads or writes stories is afflicted by it, and Shae's little brother perished.
Since then, books have been banned, and so has education.
Society is sinking into a quagmire of half-truths, gossip and lies.
That's why Shae prefers to keep to herself what moves her.
However, when her mother is killed for no apparent reason, Shae's attitude changes.
Anger and the desire for revenge drive them to the epicenter of magical power.
There she realizes - the readers already suspect it - that she is a bard herself.
From then on, Shae not only tries to solve the murder of her mother and to control her powers, but also to assert herself as one of the few women and to rebel against the man at the top of this dictatorship, who manipulates his subjects and the victims of his abuse of power muzzle - and the Shae compares with his "daughter".
Farrow makes allusions to her own biography here, but she does it so ambiguously that it hurts.
In the US, Farrow's novel was hailed as a feminist fantasy fiction.
The youth book, the start of a two-part series, shows how propaganda undermines societies and power-obsessed men suppress them, it was said.
The content is correct. But the picture that Farrow paints of abuse of power is hair-raising under-complex.
Instead of illuminating the diffuse phenomena of structural discrimination - such as the underrepresentation of women at the top of political hierarchies - Farrow designs a world in which right and wrong are so easy to distinguish from one another that no ambivalences remain at all.
In addition, Farrow lets her characters speak in platitudes.
"Justice is all that is still important to me," Shae chatters.
Also like: "My fate is sealed."
The novel is neither carefully observed nor told particularly elegantly.
Farrow makes a wise note in her epilogue, she writes: Even if society has become more sensitive to it, victims are still met with suspicion and a platform is offered to those who spread lies, hatred and fear.
It's a shame that she hasn't written a youth novel on this subject - and preferably, of course, a good one.
Icon: The mirror