The Well and the Mine

"After she the baby in, nobody believed me for the longest time. But I kept hearing that splash."

Earlier in the week I teased you with the above opening lines to The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips. It's an opener that immediately catches your attention and Virago have marketed the book well by quoting those two effective lines on the front cover. Without knowing anything about the book, you're not sure what those two lines mean but you know it can't be good; you may even guess that the splash comes from the well referred to in the novel's title and you would be correct in your surmise. The Well and the Mine is about the closely-knitted Moore family in a small coal-mining town, Carbon Hill, in Alabama. The novel opens with a unknown woman throwing a baby into the Moore family's well whilst Tess, nine-year-old middle child, watches on from the back porch.

A shocking act of seeming barbarity is the impetus given to propel a novel about everyday family life and struggle in the Depression-era South into a novel that challenges the characters' perspectives and commonly-held beliefs. The Well and the Mine is an authentic evocation of the rural South that rivals the best-loved of Southern literature. Although driven by the opening event as the family come to terms with the tragedy, each in their own way, the novel is equally about their way of life as it is about the mystery of the woman at the well; it is a story about family and being compelled to think differently when confronted with an act of unfathomable inhumanity. Being set in the American South, the novel also predictably tackles themes of race and endemic racism in a way that, although unoriginal, was challenging to the characters and, in my opinion, beautifully done. The Well and the Mine is gently told despite the horrific opener and I enjoyed its period detail and focus on the cruelty and danger of the coal-mines. There are also some wonderfully crafted lines of prose with intelligent and imaginative insights that immersed me in the story; I enjoyed the conversational style of the writing as much as the illumination it provided.

Structured through alternating passages told from the perspective of each of the five members of the Moore family, insight is given into the different compartmentalised areas of family life. The narrative didn't always work for me as I found some characters better characterised than others and found that one narrative strand did not fit (the character's perspective is given from the future so their reminiscences are outwith the time period of everyone else and when something happens to that character you know they are going to survive). However, I particularly enjoyed seeing events through the eyes of Tess, a child, and her older sister, Virgie, who is on the cusp of womanhood; I also thought that some of the passages from the point-of-view of their father, Albert, were the most beautiful, juxtaposed against the backdrop of an uncompromising life in the mine. Phillips is economical in her use of emotionally-charged scenes; the opening scene is intense enough to resonate throughout the novel with subtler, tender moments of realisation. instead. This is a novel very much about the best and worst of human nature and of people doing their best in harsh times.

The Well and the Mine is a well-written and engaging debut novel that, at first, struggled to be published; publisher after publisher in the U.S. rejected the manuscript until small-press, Hawthorne (in Oregon), published it. Gin Phillips has since won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, with Penguin US subsequently picking up the paperback rights and Virago printing it here in the UK. I predict hearing more about this novel, potentially when next year's Orange Prize for Fiction longlist goes to press.

Favourite passages:

My mama died when I was four, and I remember her laying there with blood soaking the sheets and the sweat not even dried off her face. I saw the baby she'd had die two days later, its face blue and its body shrunk like a dried peach. I've seen men carried home from the mines with eyes torn out and arms just about ripped clean off still hanging by pieces of skin. None of it stuck in my head like that little swollen thing that used to be a baby hanging over the side of our water bucket.

But you work shoulder to shoulder with a man, push his cars with him, he pushes yours, that changes how you look at things. A few years back, five men were burned to cinders in a gas explosion, and when the bodies got brought out, they was all black as coal. There'd be a Negro woman and a white woman staring at the same body. When your wives stand next to each other trying to sort out if one of those charred logs is their husband, that means something.

I was not happy with that baby for turning me inside out, and I wasn't really inclined to help him out none. It seemed like he might be nicer to me - maybe give me dreams of soda crackers and peanut butter and lemonade - if he wanted me to comfort him. But then again, maybe if we gave him a name and a mama and a house and a life, maybe he would let go of our well. And then it would be mine again.

Little, Brown (of which Virago is an imprint) approached me a few months ago about reviewing The Well and the Mine and sent me a proof copy and updated it this week with the published edition (released November 5th); I am so very glad that they did.