Only the Good Stuff: Butterfly
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Only the Good Stuff: Butterfly BUTTERFLY by Sonya Hartnett “Plum is soon to turn fourteen, and one evening she stands in front of the mirror with her school dress around her ankles, her body reflected...
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BUTTERFLY by Sonya Hartnett

“Plum is soon to turn fourteen, and one evening she stands in front of the mirror with her school dress around her ankles, her body reflected naked and distressing in the glass.”

In Butterfly – Sonya Hartnett’s wise, lyrical, and melancholy exploration of the tangled hurts and betrayals of adolescence and the much knottier disappointments that come with adulthood – Plum Coyle is a girl poised at the threshold of becoming a young woman, with all the restless confusion and insecurity that entails. Is she pretty? Is she fat? Why do her friends treat her so poorly? How can she prove to her family that she is no longer a child? The answers to these questions soon arrive in the alluring form of a glamorous and solicitous older woman named Maureen, who takes the young girl under her wing seemingly out of the goodness of her heart, but whose disquieting agenda leads to the unraveling of Plum’s entire world.

It would be hard for me to overstate how highly I think of Sonya Hartnett. I would rank her near the top of any list of the finest writers for young readers in the world, and easily among my two or three favorite authors of all time. In 2008 she won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (the Little Nobel) and is considered a national treasure in her home of Australia. Yet, she remains criminally below the radar in this country. Her voice is like no other, brimming with, as the Lindgren Award Jury put it, “…psychological depth and a concealed yet palpable anger…” Her prose delivers worlds of meaning within each passage, and her empathy with the poignancy and quiet savagery of adolescence is without peer. Her novels strike with all the force of a fist to the gut, yet leave the reader feeling as if he’s seen stars for the very first time.

Butterfly is no exception.

Take, for instance, the following passage, in which Plum confronts the consequences of revealing to her friends the compliment she has received from her new mentor, Maureen:

“… I met somebody who knows about modeling, and she said I could do it — fashion modeling. She said I have the hair and the face and the bones that magazines want …”

She trails off, realizing too late that she’s peeled herself of skin. Under the navy shade of the oak tree her friends stare in post-nuclear silence. Scattered across the lawn are young ladies in paste-colored uniforms chatting, walking, squealing, luxuriating, smoothing Reef Tan into thighs. There are teachers wandering about on yard duty, pointing out rubbish that must go in a bin. There are leaves blowing about, chip packets scooting across the quadrangle, trucks changing gear beyond the gates. There is the school dog, Ebenezer, an overweight Labrador housed at the adjoining convent, rambling from lunch box to lunch box. From the tuckshop in the undercroft comes the summery scent of jam doughnuts, chocolate milk, damp salad rolls. Soon a bell will ring, summoning everyone back to class, where the teachers will drone exhaustedly and wilted discussions will take place, and the clocks above the blackboards will be watched with gamblers’ intensity. It is Monday afternoon. It is the start of March. The week, the year, the whole torturous span of Plum’s education stretches ahead of her. She doesn’t know why she insists on making unbearable for herself this place that is already so hard.

Then they explode.

“Hair like a wig?”

“A face like a cat’s bum?”

“Everyone’s got bones! What’s so good about your bones? Even a dog wouldn’t want your bones!”

…And even Plum is chuckling, as she absolutely must. Not being wounded by any of it, as she absolutely must not.

“I’m just saying what she said!”

“Are you sure she wasn’t blind?”

“What sort of fashion will you model? Paper bags for heads?”

Even lovely Victoria has never had the gall to suggest she could be in magazines: Plum sees in the eyes of her friends something hotter and more drying than the wind. With the exception of Rachael, who’s calmly determined to study law, none of the girls know what they want to do with their lives. They foresee husbands and babies for themselves and each other, but there’s emptiness surrounding these. Certainly there’s nothing enviable awaiting Plum Coyle…

This passage illustrates the deftness of Hartnett’s hand. With cutting imagery and an unsparing eye for the viciousness of young girls, we come to understand the impossibility of Plum’s situation with her friends and get a taste of her admirable, if dispiriting self-awareness. She is a character keenly mindful of her barely-tolerated status among her peer group, and her efforts to improve her lot through an abortive home ear piercing and an utterly disastrous 14th birthday party are rendered by Hartnett with excruciating precision. Like many girls her age, Plum is a raw nerve, vulnerable to every slight and injury. Yet, despite her neediness and the many humiliations she brings upon herself, Plum retains her dignity throughout the book. She is someone with tangible goals and dreams, and though she makes many painful mistakes in their pursuit, her underlying decency and the strength of her character keep the reader rooting for her, even as we begin to recognize the threatening situation she has blundered into with her unquestioned devotion to Maureen.

Maureen seems at first a wise and sophisticated confidante, someone whom Plum can trust and freely admire without judgement. Maureen offers advice on makeup, clothes, and Plum’s diet, and even encourages Plum, whose birth name is Ariella, to begin referring to herself by the more exotic “Aria.”

Yet, as their unusual friendship develops, the terrible toll of Maureen’s self-limiting life choices becomes apparent. She has stumbled blindly into motherhood and a loveless marriage, and feeling trapped, has turned desperate and calculating. It’s safe to say without revealing too many details of the plot that her reasons for befriending and using Plum prove to be both despicable and pathetic, and by the end of the book they resolve themselves in one of the most shocking and heartbreaking final passages I’ve read.

Like much of Hartnett’s oeuvre, the intended audience for this novel is difficult to classify. Though marketed to young adults, the narrative shifts between the POVs of Plum and Maureen; Plum’s twentysomething brothers Justin and Cydar; and even Maureen’s little boy, David. While the focus remains largely on Plum herself, there are significant narrative digressions exploring grown-up themes of marriage, infidelity, motherhood, sexual frustration, and the restlessness of young men. The pacing is slow and seductive. The writing is complex and literary, rich in imagery and an emotional honesty that is at times brutal in its ugliness, and at other times breathtaking in its pathos. The book is not a light read, and anyone hoping for uplift or a tidy conclusion should probably look elsewhere.

Still, for young readers with more cultivated tastes looking for something fiercely original and uniquely moving, Butterfly is a book of profound beauty and intelligence. I give it my highest possible recommendation.

This review is posted as part of The Book Review Club. Click below to check out more cool reviews from other members of the Club!

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@Barrie Summy