Shimon Adaf, Sunburnt Faces (2013)

Well: this is something special.

It's a novel in two parts. The first is concerned with life in a provincial Israeli town during the 80s. Flora is a regular schoolgirl, in a regularly highly-strung family, going to a regular, slightly run-down school. She loses the ability to speak after a bash on the head, and -- the novel opens with this event, in a bravura passage -- receives a direct communication from God out of the television. This unlocks her mutism, and convinces her that she has to change her name to Ori (a boy's name, actually). From there the book rolls downhill into the petty stresses and joys of the quotidian. We get a very vividly rendered account of school-life, the way friendship and enmity swirl fractally through a peer group. The heat and light of the setting is oppressively well written; and the period touches (computers are new; everybody's watching Lace on telly and arguing over whether Cyndi Lauper is better than Madonna) not intrusive. In a powerful early scene a science teacher  has a nervous breakdown during a lesson, barricading the kids in the classroom. As with Jo Walton's Amongst Others, although in, I thought, a rather more realistic (that is to say: a more reined-in) manner, Adaf understands how important the imaginative escape of reading can be to a sensitive child. Ori reads a set of YA fantasy stories by a British writer with the improbable name of Prospero Juno about a young London girl called Ariella. Then, in its second part the novel jumps forward to the early 21st century. Ori is now married, a mother, living in Tel Aviv and writing her own YA fiction. Here, without going into too much spoiler-ish detail, she has a second Divine Vision that throws everything topsy-turvy.

But this novel really deserves to make a splash. The title comes from William Blake, and the whole novel is a powerful and arresting meditation on Blake's central theme. What I mean is: it explores not only 'transport' in a standard genre-Fantasy sense (although it is in part about that); it renders the ways transcendence interpenetrates the mundane -- with what raptures, with what costs. It's a story with international resonance, but it acquires a particular force by being set in Israel. I mean, in a country where the social praxis of religious observance is so pronounced, the calendar punctuated with high-day-holy-day regularity, the social and religious intertwined. This in turn foregrounds another aspect of the divine: God as habit, rather than as epiphany. One of the characters, intensely religious as a teen, looks back from the 21st-century, noting how she drifted away from religion. Had she not married, she says, she might have 'sunk into' it. 'I use that word because that's how I feel,' she says. 'That I would have sunk.'

Sunburnt Faces is one of the most compelling and arresting novels I've read all year. It is enormously to PS's credit that they've picked it up; and you really should visit their website and get yourself a copy. The translation (by Margalit Rodgers and Anthony Berris) is fluent, able to rise to the heights of Adaf's more poetic passages, although just from time-to-time liable a little to drag its prosy feet in some of the more quotidian stuff, and in the dialogue. Still: the only Hebrew I know comes immediately before stuffing my face with food, so I'm certainly not in a position to judge.

If I had to needle, I might wonder if the novel quite needs all its considerable bulk to do what it does -- it's something like 150,000 words long, and there are certainly chapters here that idle along in low gear. And the first half of the novel occasionally struggles with maintaining its high-wrought intensity -- clearly, such high-wroughtness and intensosity is a feature of adolescent life, and Adaf creates a varied and immersive fictional world. The length is part of that, too: building density and texture that enable the moments of epiphany. Amongst the highest praise I can think of for a novel is: this really isn't like anything else; and that is true to a high and brilliant degree of Sunburnt Faces. Strongly recommended.  (Cover art by Chris Roberts; he's on twitter you know. As @deadclownart. Follow him).