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A Novel
by Esther Freud
Book Reviewed by:I was working in a small Seattle bookshop in 1992 when the novel Hideous Kinky by British author Esther Freud was published. I would not fall in love with it until many years later, however, because back then I adamantly refused to read novels written for adults that had children as first-person narrators. To me, these narrators too often seemed manipulatively cloying or absurdly precocious. I wince now at my youthful dogmatism, though I admit that I am still a bit wary of books for adults that feature children as main characters.
But when BookBrowse encouraged reviewers to highlight (perhaps lesser-known) classics published before 2000, I chose Hideous Kinky. This was my chance, I felt, to rectify my early antipathy and shine some light on a book I wish I'd hand-sold to customers of that little independent bookshop all those years ago.
Hideous Kinky takes place during a year in the late 1960s, when an unnamed five-year-old English narrator and her seven-year-old sister, Bea, are taken by their young, bohemian mother, Julia, to live in Morocco. Freud captures their transient life spent living close to the financial edge. The little family moves from one living situation to another, subsisting on tight margins; some days, they have little food. They rely on the kindness of strangers and the small packets of money sporadically wired to them from the girls' father, who is otherwise uninvolved in their lives.
The book utilizes a narrowly focused, first-person child narrator in a clever way. The reader learns only what the child reports, which is only what catches her attention. She clearly does not understand many of the events she describes, such as why strange men might be bursting into their hotel room late at night. We as adult readers do, and although this makes it difficult to avoid feeling anxiety on the children's behalf, Freud is wise enough to remind the reader of a fundamental fact of life, if not always of fiction: most things that can go wrong, don't go wrong.
The young narrator does not read as a stand-in for an adult looking back at her youth, but as an authentic child, whom Freud beautifully conveys as many-faceted, the way all children are—innocent, clever, observant, capricious—and generally willing to move through new experiences as long as her emotionally anchored family is nearby. Morocco historically has been a family-oriented culture, and the author avoids exoticizing the novel's local characters in favor of highlighting their general tilt toward kindness in dealing with this strange, nomadic family.
The narrator's mother, Julia, is a complex character. Like so many young people of the 1960s, she rebels against her own traditional upbringing and chafes against British society's assumptions about her as a single mother. She yearns for a life that is both free and spiritually fulfilling and becomes interested in Sufism (see Beyond the Book). She encourages her children to speak for themselves and listens to their opinions, and she can be loving and kind, telling her daughters stories and encouraging them to tell their own. But she is herself young, self-absorbed, and distracted, and makes rash decisions that at times put the children in real danger.
Perhaps the novel is as vivid as it is because it is closely based on the life of the author. Esther Freud and her sister, Bella, were also taken to Morocco as children by their young mother, Bernardine Coverley. The girls' father was the painter Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund, who had fallen for Bernadine when she was 16 and he was in his mid-thirties. Esther has said about writing the novel, "I did wonder, on difficult days, if I should go back to Marrakech, remind myself of the 18 months we spent there, but I was worried that the memories I'd stored for 20 years, along with my kaftan, a bead choker and my sister's Arabic school book, would evaporate."
In 1998, the novel was adapted by the author into a film starring Kate Winslet. Over time, I have noticed a greater familiarity with the movie than its source. Freud's book outshines, however, because she understands this wonderful, adventurous story is, above all, a story about childhood. And who better to tell that story than the child herself?
This review
first ran in the January 29, 2025
issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
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