For a novel rooted in reality, there is an eerily mythical feel to the first few pages of The Hill, Harriet Clark’s absorbing debut about a young girl growing up with a mother in prison. ‘That great gatherings of women had been brought to live on the hill I took as the natural order. That women defected from this order was part of the order, and that we would never defect was also part of the order,’ writes Suzanna, the first-person protagonist, who is eight when the story opens. She is trying to make sense of a world that is both deeply abnormal and the only reality she has ever known.
The women’s prison has a name, Hillcrest, but is generally known as ‘the hill’; the lowercase makes it feel almost figurative, despite being a physical location. Suzanna, who lives with her grand-parents in a Manhattan apartment, is taken to the hill almost every weekend to visit her mother, first by her grandfather, Joe, and later, after his death, by a nun, Sister Claudine. Her grandmother, Sylvie, a woman who ‘did not like being told what to do’, refuses to go, and her father is not on the scene.
For Suzanna, this repetitive task, which continues throughout her teenage years, is Sisyphean in Albert Camus’s heroic sense rather than something she does out of mere obligation. Yet it makes a prisoner out of the girl too, who is a cipher for children everywhere growing up with a parent in jail. These included Clark herself, whose mother was a Weather Underground activist, who took part in the robbery of a Brink’s armoured truck in Nanuet, New York, in 1981, which left three people dead. The botched operation was meant to fund revolutionary struggle.
Little surprise, perhaps, that Helen, Suzanne’s mother, who is hardly ever referred to by name, has done something similar. A member of a revolutionary group, she drove a getaway car in a bank robbery that went awry – or was a ‘misguided attempt to steal from the rich and give to the poor’, as Joe sees it. Her sentence is for life.
But The Hill is no autobiographical indulgence. Clark is more interested in exploring concepts about what it means to be free. Suzanna and her mother are ‘free of the past and free of the future’, living a ‘timeless life’. This may work for Helen, but Suzanna can’t escape needing, eventually, to start her own life, as a guidance counsellor puts it. The twist is that she doesn’t want to. This is a haunting bildungsroman that will test your prejudices about incarceration.
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