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Evening in California: More than the backdrop for the countless dramas
Photo: Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo / Getty Images
A gun in hand, an oversized cowboy hat, and a heart full of vengeance. 13-year-old Duchess sets out to judge who she thinks is her mother's murderer. But that only happens late in this novel with the initially enigmatic title "From here to the beginning". A lot more will happen by then, almost too much for a single novel. Writer Chris Whitaker mixes crime fiction with court drama, tells a coming-of-age story and a love that takes half a life to find fulfillment.
Above all, however, Whitaker, like most good crime writers, tells not only about a crime and its investigation, but above all about how much a crime the bereaved, be it relatives or friends and sometimes even almost strangers, not for the rest of their lives lets go of more as the wounds heal too slowly.
And about how even people who weren't even born back then can become victims.
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Chris Whitaker
From here to the beginning
Editor: Piper
Translator: Conny Lösch
Number of pages: 448
Editor: Piper
Translator: Conny Lösch
Number of pages: 448
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And that brings us back to Duchess.
This angry, vulnerable, sensitive girl who grew up too early, who is so unforgiving, almost antisocial: "If you say something about my family again, I'll cut your head off, you asshole," she threatens a classmate.
Duchess grows up without a father, but with her dysfunctional mother Star, who gets involved in lousy bars with even lousy guys, and with her five-year-old brother Jakob, for whom she has to be a kind of mother substitute.
Life in the fictional California coastal city of Cape Haven, a vacation paradise and gentrification object, is overshadowed by a murder 30 years ago: Vincent King, a popular teenager, had killed his girlfriend Sissy - Star's sister. Now, after three decades, Vincent is released from prison and returns to Cape Haven. And when Star is murdered soon afterwards, it seems clear: Riley has completed what he once started.
Only one man is convinced of Riley's innocence: Chief Walker, the sheriff of Cape Haven, an overweight, painkiller-addicted cop with a big heart: “He was soft as jelly. Soft smile, soft body, soft worldview «, characterizes Duchess. Anyone who has seen the series "Stranger Things" can imagine Walker like Sheriff Jim Hopper, so initially not exactly as a radiant hero. Walker's chances of rehabilitating Riley are accordingly minimal. Especially since the policeman takes care of Duchess and Robin at the same time.
Chris Whitaker is English, but it is only logical that he is setting his novel in the USA, on the coast of California and later in the empty expanse of Montana, his characters and their stories only work against this background, in widescreen format.
Because Walker and Duchess, Star and Riley are the descendants of American prototypes, western characters actually.
Exploration of rugged landscapes of the soul
The upright sheriff, his best friend who has switched sides, the fallen woman who seeks to be forgotten in a drunkenness, the young girl who has to get by (almost) alone. Whitaker also bows to Charles Portis and his legendary western novel "True Grit", which became known in this country primarily through the film adaptation of the Coen brothers. In any case, Duchess is today's revenant of tough Mattie Ross, who wants to avenge her murdered father - if it's the last thing she does.
One can perhaps reproach Whitaker, as the writer Liz Moore, who last year wrote a novel of comparable emotional impact with Long Bright River, recently did in the New York Times, that Whitaker's America is little more than the backdrop for the countless dramas. But Whitaker is not about topography, but about exploring rugged landscapes of the soul. And the seriousness with which he literally explores the wounds of his characters, telling them along their scars, creates an enormous pull.
A seriousness that has a lot to do with the fact that, for Whitaker, writing is also always self-therapy.
As a young man he was the victim of a knife attack, he wrote in an article for the Guardian;
an event that threw him off track.
It was followed by alcohol, drugs, and suicidal thoughts.
The letter helped him get out of the hole.
Since then he has published four novels, »Von hier bis zum Anfang« is the third and so far the only one that has appeared in German.
His stories revolve around violence and murder and despair.
Whitaker also shows that people are not angry.
They just do bad things sometimes because they are desperate and lonely.
At the end of this novel, too, if there may be no redemption, there will be cause for hope. Hope that a life that seems to have been mapped out will turn out for the better. Hope that decades-old wounds will finally heal. Hope for a new beginning.