Already touted as among this year’s best fiction, does Etta and Otto and Russell and James deserve the hype?

Emma Hooper's take on marital love may be a little whimsical but it avoids sentimentality.

Saskatchewan provides the setting for Hooper’s novel. Courtesy Dave Reede

Does Emma Hooper’s take on the power of marital love merit the hype, asks Lucy Scholes

Emma Hooper's debut novel Etta and Otto and Russell and James has been featured on enough "best fiction of 2015" lists to justify the claim "hotly anticipated".

Hooper is Canadian but now lives in the UK, where she teaches at Bath Spa University. In addition to her writing, she's also a musician; her solo music project Waitress for the Bees sees her writing and performing songs, according to her website, "about dinosaurs and insects that will make your heart hurt". It all sounds a bit kooky, and although one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, the design of the UK edition is fittingly stylised – emphasising the James of the title: a talking coyote.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Despite what these titbits of information might suggest, Etta and Otto and Russell and James isn't a story about the animal kingdom. The novel begins with a note left by Etta, Hooper's octogenarian heroine, for her husband Otto Vogel: "I've gone. I've never seen the water, so I've gone there. Don't worry, I've left you the truck. I can walk. I will try to remember to come back."

And walk she does, setting off on a cross-country journey of more than 3,000 kilometres, from the landlocked Saskatchewan prairies where she and Otto live, eastwards to the coast. James soon joins her – she wakes one morning to find him licking her bruised and bleeding feet – thereafter accompanying her on her pilgrimage, reminding her to eat and offering tips on where to rest.

His inclusion isn’t the book’s only whimsy – back at home on their farm Otto bides his time making a menagerie of life-size papier-mâché animals, littering the front porch and garden, a welcome home committee lined up in anticipation for Etta’s return – but it is the only element of magical realism in a text that’s otherwise grounded in often dusty, dirty reality. Hooper may embrace quirkiness, but she doesn’t deal in sentimentality; her characters have grown up in a world where “You didn’t bother parents with child-problems unless there was blood or it involved an animal”, and even when terrible things do happen, people pick themselves up and carry on without complaining.

The most obvious way of reading James’s power of speech is through the prism of Etta’s failing mind. She’s suffering from dementia – so much so that she’s already offered to go and live in a home, though Otto vetoed this. “If I remember and you forget, we can balance, surely,” he argues with her. As her journey takes her farther and farther from her home and husband, her grip on reality becomes more and more tenuous: she’s not simply living in the past, but doing so through Otto’s eyes rather than her own, her journey to the sea becoming mixed up with the long journey home he once made across the ocean from the battlefields of Europe.

Hooper cleverly turns this into a useful narrative device, thus allowing for multiple storylines as events in the past run parallel to those in the present – the story of their current separation in step with that of the estrangement the couple endured half a century earlier.

For a story that deals in the lasting power of marital love, the fact that a portrait of Etta and ­Otto’s actual marriage – all 50-odd years of it – is completely absent is something of a notable omission. We’re shown both ­Etta’s and Otto’s childhoods, and that of Russell too – Otto’s friend and next-door neighbour, and a regular in the Vogel household where one more child went undetected among the 15 already in residence: “He worked with them, ate with them, skipped school with them and grew with them. Some of the younger children forgot or barely knew that he wasn’t their brother.”

Then there’s the occasion of the boys meeting Etta (she becomes the teacher at the tiny local school they both attend), Otto and Etta’s epistolary courtship as they write to each other while he’s away at war, and Russell and Etta’s fumblings at romance in the confusion of Otto’s long absence; but then the story takes a break until the present.

Just seeing the beginning and the end of something certainly offers an interesting perspective on the in-between, but I still wanted to learn a bit more about Russell – how he filled those lonely intervening years, nursing a broken heart while Etta and James happily set up home together next door, but perhaps that’s another story altogether.

The book is available on Amazon.

Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.