'Annabel' - Kathleen Winter

A review of one of the books shortlisted in the GLBTQ category of the Indie Lit Awards.

‘Annabel’ – Kathleen Winter

'Annabel’ is a family saga about Jacinta, Treadway and their son Wayne who live on the remote Canadian island of Labrador. It’s also a bildungsroman novel of Wayne’s life and growth.

Jacinta and Treadway live a typical Labrador life, where Treadway spends many months of his life away from their home on his trap line catching game and Jacinta lives alone. Treadway is a quiet man who prefers to be in the wilderness, rather than home with his wife. At the same time he is a kind man who works hard to provide as much as he can of what his wife needs emotionally when he is home. Jacinta belongs to the female community of the island who spend time 'longing for the intimacy they imagined would exist when their husbands came home, all the while knowing the intimacy would always be imaginary' and secretly wishing their husbands would leave when they do come home, because they women have gotten used to living alone. However Jacinta is a little more happy to have her husband home than her friends, because Treadway tries so hard to adapt to her lifestyle, despite his own interests.

Their child is born a hermaphrodite (or intersex), but his father decides a decision needs to be made about which sex his child will be so they have the child’s vagina sewn up, put him on hormones and raise him as a boy. They decide not to tell Wayne anything as he grows up. The novel then follows Wayne through life as he struggles to work out his place in the world and why his parents seem so oddly disconnected from him sometimes. Later he finds out that he is a hermaphrodite, grows up, loses a good friend, moves away and tries to decide if he wants to choose a gender to live as.

The story of Jacinta and Treadway's marriage continues without Wayne and two female characters also have seperate storylines (that description is a bit wham bam, but it's hard to describe everything this novel contains without writing a plot outline of the whole book).

One thing I liked

Someone else on the panel mentioned that they liked the examination of gender construction in this novel and I agree. ‘Annabel’ is set in a hyper-masculine community, but Winter makes sure to show how much softness there can be amongst the male community and how much traditional femininity has been assimilated by some of the trapper men into what they think of as masculinity. Pitting a person who themselves has a non-traditional gender construct (Treadway) against the existence of intersexuality gives the book depth. The author moves through different ideas on gender construction in a logical way, showing different opinions that intersex people might come to about their own gender and how their thinking might change over time. She also manages to make many of the points incorporate a universal take on how gender is constructed for and by everyone. Winter’s guiding analytical line is subtle and flexible, allowing readers to think for themselves while always being clear what the novel was trying to say at a certain time.

One thing I didn’t like

There are some jarring scene jumps in the book. Wayne can be busy doing something and then on the next page, set out as if the text just continues with no indication that it’s about to switch perspective or place, Treadway starts doing something. It didn’t happen a lot, but when it did happen it threw me out of the story so much.

Question

Have you read any novels about intersex people?

Any opinion mentioned here is my opinion and not the opinion of the whole panel, or the organisers of the Indie Lit Awards.