I had not heard of Winnie M Li, who is a Taiwanese American writer. I very much doubt if I would have read her novel ‘Dark Chapter’, had it not been this month’s assigned read for our local book group. Even then I nearly gave up a couple of times while reading it - it’s not my kind of book at all, and in places is quite traumatic.
I read the book on my Kindle, as that was the best value when I searched two or three online bookshops - and I don’t regret that, as it’s not a book I would lend or recommend to anyone else. And yet, in places it’s quite compulsive reading. The writing is good, and the way it’s written is cleverly done. It’s also a story that clearly needed to be told.
It’s no spoiler to say that, while the book is fictional, it’s based on a serious sexual assault that the author suffered some years earlier. Writing it was probably therapeutic, and hopefully of value to others who have been through similar life-wrenching abuse.
The prologue sees the protagonist, Vivian, talking to her therapist about the dreadful incident, going over it in detail yet again. And then the action switches to the past, and at first is quite confusing since there are two voices to the book. Vivian is an intelligent woman in her late twenties; the other is Johnny, an uneducated, rough and abused Traveller boy in his mid-teens.
We learn a bit of their backgrounds, strongly contrasted. Vivian has two caring parents and a sister whom she’s quite close to. She goes to the best universities, and one of her passions is travelling: exploring the world, hiking some of the recommended trails. Johnny, by contrast, is regularly beaten - quite brutally at times - by his father, who drinks far too much. He has an older brother, Michael, who is mostly benign to him, and some younger sisters and a brother whom he finds something of a nuisance. Their father beats their mother too, and Johnny wants to be tough - he hates the crying, and wants to emulate his older brother in drinking, doing drugs, and becoming intimate with women.
The narrative seems to be designed to make the reader feel sorry for Johnny, and at first this succeeded. But he’s an extremely self-centred young man, arrogant and violent, who thinks he understands women by the time he’s fourteen. We read of his attack on a girl of just thirteen when he’s a year older, luring her into the woods with lies. The incident made me shudder with disgust, and I nearly gave up reading at that point. Johnny seems to have no conscience, no sense of right or wrong.
The narrative moves forward, peppered with far too many expletives in Johnny’s sections, but they do serve to make the different voices clear. There’s tension as we see Vivian setting out on what proves to be a disastrous hike, and Johnny feeling the need of attacking a lone woman. We see both points of view as it happens; Vivian’s increasingly frightened, Johnny’s increasingly sick. When the attack is described in graphic detail, I skimmed several pages on my Kindle; I had no wish to read exactly what happened.
However, once Vivian has reached safety and called a friend who organises police reporting, the book does become more interesting and readable. Vivian is, unsurprisingly, traumatised, not just in the days following the attack, but for a long time afterwards. She had extensive therapy, but years later is still nervous about working, embarking on a new relationship, or travelling.
There’s a court case, described in detail which is also quite tense - it’s not until a verdict is given that we know which way it’s going to go. As with the earlier part of the book, the narrative keeps switching from Vivian’s viewpoint to Johnny’s, and his fictional accounts of the scene are more evidence of his extreme self-centredeness.
It’s not an enjoyable book, nor an easy one to read, but it’s a story that was worth telling, and will hopefully raise some awareness.
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