Impossible to put down, Gin Phillips' Fierce Kingdom is a fresh, multifaceted take on a survival story.
FIERCE KINGDOM
Gin Phillips
Penguin/Random House
By SHANE GILCHRIST
In her fifth novel, Alabama writer Gin Phillips plays with the wild/tame duality of a big city zoo, where the usual animals on display are the least of concerns for a mum and her young son.
Joan and four-year-old Lincoln are zoo regulars about to leave the facility late on a weekday when a series of loud cracks reverberate. Joan "tries to imagine what anyone could be doing in a zoo that would sound like small explosions ... they could not have been gunshots.'' Yet as mother and child head towards an exit, the sight of bodies and, further away, an armed man, confirm what the reader has already suspected - a mass shooting.
Set-up established, Fierce Kingdom then turns the screws.
Joan's immediate reaction is to run, to find a safe hiding place. Lincoln, meanwhile, is a child "packed to the brim with sound and movement, and one or the other is always spilling over the edges''. Normally, Joan welcomes his descriptions of toys and imaginary friends but, in this new context, such effervescence holds terrifying implications.
Thus Phillips establishes a strong and deep theme to straddle her lightning-fast narrative, her depiction of the ordinary (and magical) relationship of a mother and son offering a broader meditation on the trials of parenthood. Set against this are the twisted ambitions of disturbed young men (the initial shooter is joined by two others), whose plans extend no further than a heightened hunt that, initially, offers potential for their escape.
Following Joan's early, accidental discovery of a sanctuary, there ensues a series of episodes that ramp up the tension: the footsteps of the gunmen on a boardwalk nearby; Lincoln's growing hunger; a handful of other survivors and their interaction later in the piece; worse still, the wailing of a baby, left hidden in a rubbish bin by a mother whose fate, although not obvious, is hinted at ...
Impossible to put down, horrific yet not viscerally gory (in Phillips' hands, implication is more than enough), Fierce Kingdom is a fresh, multifaceted take on a survival story. In one corner is a tale of love; in another, a rumination on the empathy of strangers. And in another, the fuzzy, dark motivations of the bored and cruel, whose emptiness is made all the more apparent when reflected in the fierce, warm light of the bond between a mother and her child.
Shane Gilchrist is ODT books editor and a feature writer.
