Circling the Crime

What really happened? Mary Swan is an accomplished short story writer, whose best work plumbs the depths of such simple remarks. In The Boys in the Trees, her debut novel, Swan gives her preoccupation with history, in particular the gap between lived experience and documentary evidence, a sinister twist. Unlike her previous, often female, protagonists, William Heath, the central if silent figure in The Boys in the Trees, is a criminal. A proud, impoverished father who keeps to himself, one fine day Heath murders his wife and children and then runs off, only to be discovered later, alone in the neighbouring woods. So far, so melodramatic. But by choosing not to narrate the murders or enter the consciousness of Heath himself, Swan deftly shifts the focus outward, on to what came before and after, all the while implying the horrific nature of Heath’s crime and the concentric circles of secondary suffering that expand out around it, with the same calm tone and attention to detail that characterized her previous works.

This is a brave decision and, initially, Swan’s inversion of our expectations seems both radical and refreshing. Despite its lurid subject matter, the novel eschews direct conflict, concentrating instead on closely detailed interiors, lives lived alone, in silence and mostly indoors. Heath’s wife and daughters, their spinster schoolteacher and a young female neighbour speak their thoughts privately to the page while out in the world men jostle uncomfortably, compete for space. Only the boys in the trees, desperate to escape, gain any overview, and even their insights are limited. And each deeply internal account is brought to an abrupt close only to be replaced by another, much the way death summarily interrupts our thoughts, replaces one generation’s hard-won insights with the relative ignorance of the next.

Beginning with Naomi, Heath’s wife, Swan presents us with chunks of personal testimony that are self-contained and separate, and, although the chapters are more or less chronological , each is told from a different point of view. These narrative passages are interspersed with particularly visual, short, lyrical meditations on pivotal physical objects—gun, locket, button, house, knife, etc. Disturbing to read, the novel consists of detailed, time-limited exposures that shear off suddenly, like the edges of photographs. And by brutally cropping them, Swan nudges her reader toward vertiginous edges. We meet Alice, the town’s schoolteacher, on the morning of Heath’s execution, carefully edging around his dead daughter’s school things, which Alice now keeps in her room. We leave Heath’s daughter, Lilian, just as her father approaches her, one hand hidden behind his back. Yet by keeping so far inside these borders, Swan’s restraint nearly becomes excessive. Her characters address the reader but not each other, and remain perpetually isolated, on the brink of action, never entirely coming to life. By the end of the book, the reader may feel short-changed by Swan’s refusal to release her characters, to let them act as well as feel and think.

The novel’s energy is reserved for symbol and imagery. A fascination with the undocumented, the apparently accidental, accompanies Swan’s obsessive recording of cause and effect. A superficial hand injury eventually kills Heath’s guilt-ridden doctor, Robinson. But how accidental was it? And what would have become of him had he lived? The “meanings” of such events remain irreducible. Robinson’s young son, Eaton, recalls his father’s anguished glance at him during Heath’s execution, and comments “if he could only understand what it was telling him, it would be a thing he would know for the rest of his life.” He cannot know, of course, because he is outside it, outside the hauntingly intense glance that dogs him. And as readers we have already heard from Robinson, whose version of events is different, less personal: he did not even know his son was there. In this way, Swan pushes traditional cause-and-effect narrative almost to breaking point, revealing the myriad viewpoints and countless narrative threads linking events and people, such that the truth can never be entirely pinned down.

The murders occur in 1888, just as photography was becoming commonplace, and the book is rife with references to the complex relationship of photographs to reality. Once again, this theme has its precedents in Swan’s previous writing. “You have probably seen photographs of Mary McIntyre, you may even have one on the wall in your den,” comments the narrator in “The Sea, the Sea,” a gem of a short story, in which the writer-narrator speculates on the demise of an unremarkable historical figure. It is not what we can see of Mary but what we cannot that fascinates Swan. Similarly, in The Boys in the Trees, the hole in the text where Heath’s testimony would normally be increases in resonance as the book continues, just as, over time, photos not taken and pictures not drawn acquire more significance than those that are. For example, in the chapter narrated by Lilian, Heath’s sickly elder child, she returns again and again to a family photo her father ultimately decided against having taken. We also learn later that her sister, Rachel, left out a crucial drawing from a book she was secretly compiling, intending to give it to her father, a drawing of the family as a group. In a later chapter, Eaton, the son of the doctor who attends Heath at his execution, looks back on a life increasingly recorded in photographs only to decide that “the person you were was perhaps formed most by all that you had forgotten.” In this way, Swan evokes how what is documented points to its own edges, to what is not recorded: the dark matter of human experience.

In the end, William Heath does not seem evil, although he is not exonerated. Perhaps, the novel suggests, it was the violence of poverty or an accumulation of small assaults, combined with an abusive upbringing, that pushed him over into murderousness. Either way, by choosing to record his execution by hanging rather than his crimes, Swan shifts the focus of our curiosity outward, back onto society. We observe Heath’s hanging through the eyes of Eaton, a young boy up a tree approximately the same age as the boy whose climb into a tree begins the novel, a boy who is never named but is clearly Heath. Swan suggests a disturbing equality, how “each one grows in its own way, and some … twisted and stunted by the ones that surround them, while others burst up and through.”

Swan’s greatest achievement in The Boys in the Trees is the novel’s strenuously even and measured tone that remains true despite shifts in viewpoint and regard, its insistence on the slow, gradual accumulation of insight and detail. Unfortunately, this is also its greatest weakness. Employing the self-restraint William Heath lacked, Swan traps her characters in frames rather than letting them roam free and in this way deprives her readers of total involvement.