Review of DEVOTION by Hannah Kent

 3.5 Stars

I’ve read Hannah Kent’s two previous novels, Burial Rites (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2017/07/ristapar-and-burial-rites-by-hannah-kent.html) and The Good People (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2018/01/review-of-good-people-by-hannah-kent.html), and I loved them both.  Like the first two, the third also portrays women on the fringe, but it is less impressive.

The novel begins in 1836 in a Prussian Old Lutheran community.  Fourteen-year-old Hanne is the narrator.  She’s a bit of a misfit with no real friends until she meets Thea, the daughter of a family that moves to the village.  The two form a deep friendship that soon develops into love.  Facing religious persecution, members of the community immigrate to southern Australia where they establish a new settlement. 

Hanne describes herself as “nature’s child” who “loved to be outside, because that was where the world sang to me.”  She has synesthesia so she hears the natural world as music.  For instance, she listens to trees which sing to her and says, “the sound of snow falling was like chimes.”  It is this synesthesia and her rather obsessive love for Thea that define her.  She does not otherwise feel like a fully developed character.

I enjoyed the first part of the novel, but then there is an unexpected twist mid-way that upends the reader’s expectations.  The event is foreshadowed as a “great cataclysm” and it is indeed that.  Unfortunately, the supernatural turn of events just doesn’t work for me.  And towards the end, a scene involving Hanne, Thea, and Hans is not only ridiculous but cringe-worthy.  The use of the mystical Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses is problematic because it was first published in 1849 although Thea’s mother has an old copy. 

Many of the secondary characters tend to fall into categories like sympathetic, kindly outcasts (Hanne, Thea, Anna Maria), spiteful gossips (Magdalena and Christiana Radtke), and limited patriarchs (Pastor Flügel and Heinrich Nussbaum).  And no one changes or experiences any personal growth.  Everyone falls on the spectrum between religious and superstitious:  “how easily superstition creeps into the smallest of gestures.” 

The focus of the book is the relationship between Hanne and Thea.  Hanne never doubts her love for Thea and her descriptions verge on the rhapsodic.  After a while, her extravagant emotions seem excessive and become tedious.  I would have liked more explanation of why the two love each other; much of their attraction seems to just be the result that both are outsiders. 

The book skims over the racial issues once the persecuted Prussians become the colonizers in Australia.  Hanne does comment that her people “disfigured the land back into Prussia” and she mentions seeing “ugly shepherds of smallpox and violence force an unnatural migration upon these people, away from the country they belonged to.”  There are few encounters with the Aborigines, though one near the end is an ugly one.  Hanne witnesses this confrontation but turns away and reacts with a thought:  “Thea is not here.”  I think Hannah Kent missed an opportunity to more fully address the hypocrisy of the persecuted becoming the persecutors.

For me, this book was a disappointment.  I would have preferred a more straightforward historical novel without the supernatural and mystical elements.  Focusing on a homosexual relationship among members of a rigid religious group is daring, but the obsessive nature of the love left me conflicted.