Devotion by Hannah Kent
Reviewed by Cath Barton
Is Australian writer Hannah Kent’s new novel a story of love unrequited or lost? So the preface of Devotion makes us wonder. It turns out to be a layered exploration of the power of love across time and space.
Kent sets Devotion in the nineteenth century, as she did her earlier novels Burial Rites and The Good People, and like them it is inspired by real life events of the time. It is 1836; in the German state of Prussia there are communities called Old Lutherans who refuse to join the Prussian Union of Churches and do not accept its new prayer book. They look to emigration as a way of finding religious freedom. This is the context in which Kent introduces Hanne, the narrator of her story. At nearly fifteen Hanne is on the brink of womanhood, but feels as oppressed by the prospect of what that entails as her parents do by the Prussian state. She feels that nobody sees her for who she is and looks for solace in nature. This changes when she meets Thea, the daughter of newcomers to the village; they fall into friendship ‘like rain to the ground, like stones into water’.
Hanne and Thea’s families are granted safe passage to Australia aboard the Kristi but the voyage is long, the ship overcrowded and the passengers afflicted by sea sickness and, worse, typhus. It is not an environment in which it is easy for a burgeoning relationship to flourish, but the two women draw closer together. When a huge whale arcs from the ocean they see it as a gift, a sign of something miraculous.
Never was a book more aptly titled: the idea and meaning of devotion being explored in the novel in multiple spiritual, emotional and physical senses. As I read, I found myself thinking of Shelley’s poem about love, One Word is Too Often Profaned, which ends with the line ‘the devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow’. It is a poem which coincidentally was written only a few years before the time in which Kent’s novel is set.
If this sounds like a conventional love story, albeit between two women, both expected by their families to marry men, it is not. During the voyage to Australia things take an unexpected turn and nothing can be the same again. From this point on Kent combines an account based on historical fact – the ship arrives safely in South Australia and the Old Lutheran community establishes itself in a new country – with a work of imagination of remarkable and engrossing depth.
Landscape and the ways in which people interact with it are central to Devotion. Hanne is able to hear the voices in nature, akin to music, so that when she and Thea stand together in the falling snow in Prussia she says: ‘It pealed down around us like the ringing of bells, and we were anointed together, blessed over and over.’ Kent’s choice of language is precise and beautiful, never mawkish.
In the very different environment of South Australia, nature is more raw and Hanne, changed herself, hears and experiences more of it. There is another aspect of devotion here, which relates to the indigenous peoples of Australia, specifically the Peramangk people on whose land the Old Lutherans of the book (and in historical reality) ‘settled’. In her portrayal of Hanne’s singing to and with the land, Kent shows an appreciation of and respect for the beliefs of Aboriginal people about the journeys of their ancestral spirits as they created the land and its animals. It is, as well, pertinent to the story of Devotion that in the days of the early ‘settlers’ the Peramangk often regarded white people as the ghostly reincarnations of their own ancestors.
Thea tells Hanne, in the early days of their relationship, that her mother Anna Maria also hears things that other people can’t. Anna Maria, who is a Wend (Slav) so already an outsider, is regarded by the Old Lutheran community with suspicion, her use of healing herbs as transgressive; it is another strand in the exploration in this novel of how difference is manifest, experienced and seen, or not seen.
As you reach the end of this immersive novel think back to the beginning when you first met Hanne and heard how she felt she was not seen. Ah, you will say, I see! Kent has explored, in the pages of this story, the hidden depths of human existence. You may see it as magical. You may be reluctant to leave the world into which Kent has taken you. And when you do, you may look at the world in which we live now differently because — consider this as a possibility — magic, or maybe just hope, may be available to any of those who open their senses to it.
Devotion is published by Picador, 3rd February 2022