As a people, and even in the face of all evidence to the contrary, we like to believe that things can be as good as our daydreams.
We see families as Norman Rockwell paintings of domestic perfection, Christmas as a uniform time of seamless joy and warm-spirited harmony and love, well love is perfect and caring and supportive and every last good and wonderful thing on this planet.
But what if, wonders masterful writer Alice Pung in her impressively affecting new 1986-set work, One Hundred Days, if those rose-coloured glasses fall off, or were never on in the first place, and we have to confront a world, on a daily basis, where love is lacking a great many of those gilded elements we so laud.
That’s certainly the reality facing Karuna, a sixteen-yer-old girl coping with the departure of her father from the family home, and her home from to a fourteenth-floor housing commission where her controlling, idiosyncratic mother, known as Grand Mar throughout the book, keeps an eagle eye on her every move.
There’s no doubt that Karuna’s mum loves her but it evinces itself in ways that suggests more of an abusive form of control than any warm and fuzzy sense of mother-daughter kinship.
In the middle of all this upheaval and desperate to escaper mother’s controlling hand, Karuna meets a guy, sleeps with a guy and falls pregnant, a turn of events that sends a shockwave through her now very small family, causing her mum to turn the screws still further in a bid to contain the damage done by not-on-purpose-not-entirely-by-accident act by a teenager trying to figure out the uncertain form of her life.
“She was pissed off because my beauty didn’t come naturally anymore, and I was reminded of this every day when I looked at our living-room wall and saw the most perfect self I would ever be, a self I didn’t even remember being, smiling down at me like a twinkle-star on top of a Christmas tree with no presents underneath.” P. 20)
A life that, it has to be noted, now looks far more constrained than ever, not simply in the locked down immediate present but far into the future with Karuna and mum battling over who will parent the child and where the exact lines of responsibilities will lie.
It’s a fractious situation and decidedly grim in many respects but Pung, who writes with a self-assured sense of empathy and insightful appreciation of the human condition, also infuses it with a great deal of warmth and good humour, never quite relinquishing the fact that reconciliation and love can still grow even where their emergence seems to be an impossibility.
It is this extraordinary balance between the obvious very worst of things and the hidden but still evident possible best of things that imbues One Hundred Days with such a fearsome emotional impact.
And it does make quite an impact as you read what is in many ways a slowly-percolating story and yet one which has at its considerable heart a huge amount of important things to say about family, love, growing up and navigating the present day with past trauma always nipping at your heels.
What gives One Hundred Days such an affecting centre is Karuna, a protagonist who is far from having it all together – she is only sixteen after all and has yet to fully understand how complicated life can be – and yet, who is far wiser and insightful than many adults.
Her perception is borne of a life lived on the outer edges of life, where she can see what life is like for other people – the young guy with whom she has a brief summer relationship is off to study to be a doctor, his world far more open with possibility than Karuna’s will ever be – but of which she may never be able to be a part.
Not that, in many ways, she is worried.
While comments are made of her promise and ability and the great things she could do with her life, Karuna simply wants a life where love makes sense, where her friends stay by her and where she can love her new child in a way her mother loved her.
But this is of course where it all gets rather complicated and where Pung brings her gloriously good style of thoughtfully insightful writing to bear.
Does Karuna’s mum actually love her? It seems so but weighed down by past trauma of her own, she is unable to express in a way that makes sense to her exhausted daughter who only sees control, manipulation and pain.
Will they ever find a way to bridge that gap, that raging chasm that sits overwhelmingly uncrossable between them and which seems to defy any and all attempts to forge some sort of bond?
“Her hands are trembling fists. Her face is a mad magenta.
‘You’re right!’ she rails. ‘They’re right! I don’t know anything!’
She’s like a big baby overflowing with futile fury, a grown-up upright replica of you before you howl.‘No, you don’t,’ I say, rubbing it in. ‘You can’t lock me up to keep me safe.’
And there and then, I have said it. Love is not about control, despite what your Grand Mar believes.” (P. 215)
One Hundred Days doesn’t exactly set out to see if that’s possible, preferring to document Karuna and her mum’s struggle to exist within the same apartment and within the too-tight boundaries of their fractured mother-daughter relationship, but it does invest a great deal of time in exploring if it possible for a love to difficult to ever reach a good place.
One thing that Pung is clear about is that life really ties itself up in pleasingly tidy bows.
All too often, the closure we seek is absent, the obvious route somewhere doesn’t make itself apparent, or if it does, stacks itself so full of obstacles it’s not an option anyway, and the happy ever after ending we think might be good isn’t what we want or choose after all.
For all of her embracing of the oft grim realities of life, Pung doesn’t give into a melancholic finality about the hopelessness of life.
Throughout One Hundred Days, with its vivid mix of the good and the bad, the depressing and the hopeful, we see life as it really is – a mix of possibility, loss, open roads and dead ends, and things like love not behaving as we think they will but coming with a reality all their own, one that pays less attention to fairytale aspirations as it does to the way things really are and which may, just may, find a way through after all, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.