At the core of When God Was A Rabbit is the familial love in an incredibly pure and natural form. This book follows the life of Eleanor Maud Portman from her birth through four decades of her life as well as the most important constants in her life - her parents, her aunt Nancy, friends Jenny Penny and Charlie, the whimsical elderly Arthur, and the most important of all, her older brother Joe. When God Was A Rabbit takes you through unique experiences, both uplifting and earth-shattering, for every character and it has its impact at every turn. No character is irrelevant at any time, they are present when they contribute something to the story and absent when they are not.
The book is split into two parts - the first covering the time between Eleanor's birth and ends when she's around 12-13 years old and the second part skips forward 15 years following roughly 6 years of Eleanor's adulthood. It goes across moments in 4 decades of her life. While reading it, you might think that this family and these characters have led very tragic lives and you wonder how they are still such a positive family, accepting every hurdle that comes their way and living their life for the most part joyfully. But by the end when you recount everything that happened throughout the book, this is a narrator who is choosing all the most significant things that tell the story she is trying to tell. If you went through your own life trying to explain to someone why something is the way it is now, you would cherry-pick all the events that you believe directly contribute to it. And that's what this book does. I think that's probably why there is a 15-year gap in the narrative as the narrator does not believe anything in that time to be relevant to where we are going.
This most prominent part of this story is the importance of familial love, for the family you are born to and the people you meet through life that become extended family, playing heavily on the concept of found family. The love that I felt coming off the page between members of this large family felt so natural and familiar, it's a type of familial love that feels so much more real and rooted in reality than you often see in books, TV and film. And at the heart of that is the bond between a brother and sister, Eleanore and Joe, how their bond benefitted them and the people they had relationships with. The title itself is about a rabbit that played a special part in how they came to be as they are. There is an element of codependency between them that comes from it but they do eventually find that they have to unlearn it without growing distant. Though growing up, influenced by how she could rely on and be dependent on Joe, Eleanor's appreciated for that support seems to have led her to want to be that person for her close childhood friend, Jenny. It's something instinctive when you are grateful for something someone else does for you, you want to do that same thing for others when you realise you are in a position to do so. This element of the book resonated with me deeply as the familial love on display felt like my experiences with my own family a lot of the time and I have often found I want to be the support to my friends and younger sister I've felt my older sisters were to me my whole life and continue to be.
The narrative voice flowed so smoothly that you move from one page to the next, one sentence to the next without realising just how much you have easily read, floating along rhythmically. Winman's use of shorter sentences making up the bulk of the work wasn't jarring as it could have been but is the reason the words moved so smoothly. With this technique combined with the more depressing moments, at no point does anything feel particular dark and dire through the books, nothing feels too daunting. A narrative device Winman uses sparingly through the book is historical references to get a feel for what is happening in the world at the time of each event in Eleanor's life - John Lennon being shot, the death of Princess Diana and 9/11. With all these references, I was surprised that the AIDS epidemic of the 80s wasn't mentioned once. Once I figured out what years corresponded with what age Eleanor and Joe would have been, I realised that Joe was a young man around his 20s during the 1980s and it is established early on that he is gay. I found myself worried that the story may have led to him dying until there were moments where Eleanor briefly talks about things they did in their later adult years in the narrative which reassured me that he was okay. I think of all the historical references, it still was one that I think could have and possibly should have been mentioned.
Though the narrator is recounting all this as an adult, she still approaches everything the way she saw them at the time rather than let hindsight clear things up and embellish them. She talks about things that happened in her childhood and how she felt about them the way she thought about them at that age. The reader has to read between the lines a little bit but it's not too hard, it's very easy to see. For example, with hindsight, I remember feeling a lot differently about certain things in my life at 16 years old than what I wrote about them in journals at the time - my perspective has changed and so without those journals I would tell a story a different way than how it actually happened. And memory is a tricky thing in this book as Winman uses amnesia as a plot device nearing the end to make things come full circle. This is the part of it that lead me to the opinion that Eleanor picks out the parts of her childhood that are important to this moment nearing the end. There is a secret between Joe and Elly as a 10 and 5-year-old respectively that cements their dynamic but it is something that they bury deep in their memory and all but forget. This is something that had to come out at some time and it seems there was never the right moment until recovery from amnesia prompts it. It was one part of the book that felt necessary when you finish it but out of place while reading it.
Reasons to Recommend:
- Starts with some amusing and interesting religious and philosophical questions and outlooks children
- It's a book that mends your heart as it breaks it
- There is pure familial love at its core
- Natural ease in narrative voice making it easy and enjoyable to read
- A great book to get into Sarah Winman's work if you're interested in reading more of her books - this is the first one I've read and now I want to read all the others
- So many more reasons that I know are valid but I just can't form them into sentences for bullet points.
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