SACRED COUNTRY
Rose Tremain
Washington Square Press
1992
Ms. Hen has recently become interested in transsexuals, not
the how, but the why. Why would someone want to be different from they way they
are? Why would a woman feel that she is supposed to be a man and vice versa?
Ms. Hen found a lot of nonfiction books about transsexuals, but she wanted to
read a novel, because she thinks she can get inside a character’s skin better
if she reads fiction. She found this novel, about a transsexual man, his life
and transformation.
Mary Ward feels as if she were trapped in the wrong body from
the time of the two-minute silence when the king of England dies in 1952. She
is six years old. Her father had lost one of his ears during World War II. Her
father wanted her to be a boy when she was born, and is disappointed that she
is a girl. Her brother, Timmy, is not as strong as Mary.
Mary does what she wants to do, and does not listen to
people. SACRED COUNTRY is filled with lonely characters: Mary’s mother’s
Estelle, goes in and out of a psychiatric hospital; her brother, Timmy, does
not want to work the farm; their neighbor, Walter, dreams of going to Nashville
to become a country singer. Nobody in the book has what they want, and they
dream of other lives.
The setting plays a big part in how the characters feel
about their lives. In Suffolk, in the village of Swaithy, people have no hope
that their lives will change. Mary does not want to be a girl; when she visits
her grandfather she decides that she want to be called Martin, and her
grandfather goes along with that. He is intelligent enough that when the time
comes for Martin to reveal his true self, the grandfather accepts him.
Mary moves to London and tries to survive in the big city, attempting to transform himself into Martin. He seeks professional help, makes
friends, works at a magazine, and has a series of operations. He suffers from
not getting what he wants, but he keeps going on.
Martin struggles to find peace, but it comes to him in
waves. He can’t get exactly what he wants, but he finds that he does not need that
much in his life to be satisfied.
Ms. Hen was pleased that there were chickens in
SACRED COUNTRY. The Ward family owns a farm, so of course they had hens and
roosters running around. Ms. Hen’s favorite chicken in the novel was the patient
in the psychiatric hospital with Estelle, Alice, called “The Chicken Lady.” She
decided one day that she would rather be a chicken than a human. Many characters in this novel want to be
something that they’re not, and The Chicken Lady is an extreme version of that notion. Ms. Hen knows
that The Chicken Lady is out of touch with reality, but she thinks that if
someone wants to be an animal it’s admirable that she would want to be a
chicken.
Ms. Hen loved this novel. She thinks she doesn’t understand
the why of transsexuals, but she understands that some things simply are the
way they are. We can’t change how we feel, but we can change our view of the
world. Change comes from within, and viewing our lives with new eyes can be
enlightening, as it is for Martin Ward when he becomes who he is supposed to be.
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