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Muddling through, with jokes: Hilary McKay's Casson novels.

Article Excerpt
At a conference a couple of years ago, I heard a British writer talking about Hilary McKay's Whitbread Award-winning novel Saffy's Angel (2001). She was enthusing about it in comparison to other novels published in Britain in the same year. In contrast, I seem to recall her saying, to the plethora of stories about homes with, say, lesbian mums, eating disorders, or drug problems, Saffy's Angel was about a "normal" family. What a relief! she implied.

I'm not sure this speaker realized how many in her audience she alienated with her narrow assumptions about what is "normal"; but more interesting to me, as I think about her comment in retrospect and in the light of McKay's sequels Indigo's Star (2003) and the recent, triumphant Permanent Rose (2005), is just how cleverly, sensibly, and hilariously McKay writes about issues, emotional depths, and an abnormal (in the aforementioned speaker's terms, at any rate) family. So cleverly, sensibly, and hilariously does she do this that one website reviewer opines that Saffy's Angel--which concerns adopted Saffy's search for identity--is "not very profound," while its sequel, Indigo's Star, is praised in print as a "real feel-good novel." Even among more knowledgeable reviewers, no one identifies the Casson stories as problem novels even though they deal with social and emotional matters that, in a lesser writer's work, would overwhelm us with the characters' miasmic angst and self-absorption.

In fact, Saffy's Angel and its sequels are profound. And the Casson family is definitely not "normal" in any bland sense. "Oh, you Cassons are so artistic and dysfunctional and cool, it's not fair," Saffy's friend Sarah complains; but the quaint chaos that inspires this comment is nothing compared to the serious moral quagmires and emotional upsets that the Cassons traverse and endure regularly. There's Bill, the estranged, adulterous father; Eve, the (effectively) single mum; and the children, each suffering with her or his own problems--Saffy, the Cassons' adopted cousin, who searches for the truth about her parentage; Indigo, who endures a term of nasty bullying; Caddy, who is terrified of her impending marriage; and eight-year-old Rose, who takes to shoplifting as a way to distract herself from yearning for an absent friend. Not to mention that Saffy's best friend Sarah has cerebral palsy (or something like it) and gets about in a wheelchair; that Indigo and Rose's American friend Tom didn't speak...