Amy Espeseth has lived in Australia since the late 1990s, but grew up in rural Wisconsin in a landscape not dissimilar to the setting of Sufficient Grace. In Wisconsin, ‘winter can last almost the length of a pregnancy and hunting and fishing are not just hobbies, but a mainstay against hunger’, writes Espeseth. From naming her fictional town Failing to the visceral description of the slaughter of a deer in the prologue, and through the subsequent chapters set from November to March, Espeseth presents a picture of the harsh existence in that inhospitable climate.

The persistent Midwestern vernacular might be irritating were it not that the voice of the narrator, thirteen-year-old Ruth Rundhaug, is clear and strong from the beginning: wise in the way of children inured to hardship; naïve in her acceptance of a superstitious faith. By the time she describes the Pentecostal Full Quarter Church of Failing, which her family attends and where her Grandma Esther regularly speaks in tongues and is blessed by the Holy Spirit with the gift of prophecy, the reader is enthralled by her shrewd drawl and unflinching gaze.

Ruth stitches together canny observations of the natural world and homespun wisdom to construct an elemental understanding of cause and effect in human behaviour. Blood is the prevalent theme: the blood of the hunt; family blood; menstrual blood; miscarriage; violence. It is not difficult to smell what is coming. Guessing which commandment will be broken is more difficult, though clues are littered through the text. ‘There’s pow’r in the blood, pow’r in the blood. Sin stains are lost in its life-giving flow,’ sing Ruth and her brother Reuben, riding home in the back of the truck one freezing night. Ruth finds a wood tick stuck deep in her hair. Reuben ‘scrapes his dirty fingernails close down by [her] scalp and pinches the body tight’ and digs out the tick. Even the lowly tick can be a messenger of God in Ruth’s world. God speaks through the blood; the author speaks through the language of small incidents, or presentiments, such as these.

Truths emerge before Ruth fully understands the meaning of what she describes: ‘What a funny word: hide. It is the skin of an animal. Hide is where the hunters sit. And hide is what we do to escape.’ She is talking about a caged raccoon, ‘too dumb to know how to escape; too dumb or too scared or just too plain tired’, but she might as well be talking about her mother, her Aunt Gloria, cousin Naomi, or herself, all trapped in fearful or submissive relationships with their menfolk.

What Ruth knows of men is the crushing flintiness of her father, the hellfire and brimstone preaching of her Uncle Ingwald, and the unreliability of her alcoholic Uncle Peter. Teenage Reuben and his cousin Samuel aspire to the cruelty of men and revile the softness of women: ‘... the boys don’t lose no sleep and the boys break all the rules,’ says Ruth. ‘It is never enough to just look; boys need to keep. And they always need to touch.’ What Ruth extrapolates from the boys’ need to prove their manhood through ownership and destruction is that sensitivity is the worst sin.

Over and over, Ruth intuits secrets from what is shared and open. Her description of the process of taxidermy suggests that wilful blindness is essential to preserving the status quo of her extended family:

That animal is more than dead: it is empty, but this is the only way to pretend it is still alive. We all pretend together. Whether the skunk is stuffed and mounted with glass eyes and one foot raised up ready to step, or whether the pelt is soft and silky and ready to make a fur collar, we all pretend together that it is real. It will stay that way forever.

But sins will not stay buried: ‘whatever is secret, is meant to be known ... Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.’ Her religion gives cold comfort, but Ruth can speak only in parables and metaphors of the horrors she witnesses and experiences. She has no other language, nothing to believe in, no one to look to for help, certainly none of the adults, only herself, her anthropomorphic dreams and her heavenly voices. Drowning the cries, the screams, the roars of pain and fear and anger, ‘there is no sound except the language of angels’.

To Espeseth’s credit, Sufficient Grace is one of those rare début novels whose narrative progresses through allusion rather than assertion. The overwrought Gothic atmosphere may not be to everyone’s taste, but I am reminded of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic Blood Meridian (1985): its biblical lyricism and themes of violence, power, and sin. The licence to talk of death, retribution, and avenging angels, as if they exist, seems not only exotic in a literary context, but also hopeful that we need not always be entrenched in prosaic realism.

CONTENTS: SEPTEMBER 2012