Review of Six Pounds Eight Ounces, by Rhian Elizabeth, Seren 2014

If the teachers liked teaching once, they definitely don’t any more. […] They trip up, we laugh. They cry, and it’s even funnier. […] We make fun of their twitches and the way they speak, that’s if we let them speak at all. […] Because this is war. […] Although when I say we, I don’t actually mean me and Jess. We always wear the right uniform and do our ties up properly. We bring our homework in on time and only ever talk in class with a teacher we’re not afraid of.

The way this passage subverts and undermines its original premise is typical of Rhian Elizabeth’s debut novel. Hannah, its narrator and protagonist, announces herself from the start as an unreliable narrator: a potential author of fiction, indeed. Having done so, she then proceeds to speak, for the most part, very openly and honestly, so you forget for long stretches that, apart from being a child, she also sees herself as a writer who embroiders and riffs on reality. She pulls this trick several times in the narrative, recounting something as if it had actually happened, before making it clear that this was in fact only one of several possible outcomes and not the one that actually came to pass.

“The truth”, whatever that may be, is a key theme of the novel; most of Hannah’s problems with adults are caused by their elastic definition of truth. They cannot tell childish fantasies from lies, yet themselves distort or ignore the truth when it does not suit them, like the grandmother evading a question about someone’s terminal illness by pretending her hearing aid is on the blink.

Hannah’s first-person narrative begins when she is aged five and ends when she is sixteen. First person in a very young voice is hard to pull off, especially when, as seems to be all but compulsory these days, the novel is in the present tense. If you write first person in past tense, you can have it both ways: write from the perspective of the child that was, but with the vocabulary of the adult you now are, and no reader thinks it odd – it is, after all, how most of the greatest child voices in literature were created. But with the present tense, we can only suppose it is All Happening as we read, and that is more problematic. When I came across the first age marker that told me Hannah was five, I was downright surprised; I had already been listening to her voice for two chapters and it wasn’t the voice of a five-year-old, even a clever one. She could think like that, but she couldn’t possibly formulate her thoughts in some of the ways this voice does.

This did cause me some problems near the start, though fewer than it might have done because the writing is extremely assured, quite unusually so for a first novel, and tends to carry you along with it. By the next time marker – going to comprehensive school at 11 - Hannah’s age has caught up with her voice and the problem disappears. The teenage argot and behaviour of Hannah and her best friend Jess are observed with forensic and often very funny accuracy; young readers (and this novel should appeal to both an adult and young-adult readership) will be cackling, while readers with teenagers of their own will be tearing their hair and longing, at intervals, to slap the pair of them. Though often infuriating, they are so basically bright and harmless that one cannot be indifferent to what happens to them, particularly when self-destructive urges seem to have taken them over. The downward spiral they get into is, again, very subtly observed, so that, for instance, the decline in their standards of personal hygiene hits us as forcibly as it does the young narrator in one of her more lucid moments.

Another instance of this subtlety in the writing struck me in the account of the school outing to a play in Cardiff. I know that this event, though not, thank heaven, its riotous outcome, is based on fact, because I saw that very production there myself. At first, it seemed odd that Hannah is not sorry to see the play interrupted; at this point she is very keen on English and, unlike most of her classmates, has read it. Only later did it occur to me that the play bears on her life and contains a character she might well wish to see silenced. There is absolutely no mention of this in the account of the incident; the reader is left to figure it out in a way many writers would not have had the confidence to do, especially at such an early stage of their career.

Here, the author has taken a real event and transmuted it into the material of fiction. As the novel ends, Hannah in unreliable-narrator mode challenges us to wonder if she will do so, or is already doing so:

It took me a while but I know now that words are nasty little things and I’m done with them. And it’s funny, isn’t it? I did warn you. I told you right from the start that I’m the girl who lies, so, really, you probably shouldn’t believe a single word I’ve said.

I think this novel’s title does it less than justice. There is a reason for the clear reference to a birth weight, but as an attention-grabber, an incentive to pick up the book, I should say it was a non-starter – indeed to some it may signal “mum-lit”, which could not be less accurate (mother’s place, in this book, is firmly in the wrong). It deserved a more memorable, unusual title, perhaps with a dash of the humour that never deserts Hannah. The writing is confident, assured and doesn’t sound like anyone else I can think of offhand.