This is my review of Year of the Drought  by Ronald Buti.

During the intense summer drought of 1976, which all who lived through it can never forget, thirteen-year-old Gus is growing up on the family farm in French-speaking Switzerland. In what seems at first like a slow-burning, even somewhat bland “coming of age” novel, narrated years later by Gus himself, what really held my attention was the expressive clarity of the writing: the vivid descriptions of the merciless, monotonous heat, the parching of the countryside; the close observations of the working of a farm, the unrelenting hard labour, and vulnerability of the business, in particular the chicken shed in which Gus’s father has borrowed heavily to invest; the gradual revelation of relationships within what initially seems a stable family, seen through the eyes of an unusually thoughtful and perceptive boy, still too young to understand fully what is going on.

For Gus, his father Jean is a rock, unflagging in his physical and mental strength. A peasant at heart, there is a certain rigidity in his attitudes, yet also signs of his essential decency in, for instance, his decision to employ a simple-minded relative Rudy, who would otherwise have been consigned to an asylum which would have driven him totally mad, whereas on the farm he can at least be useful. Jean clearly loves his graceful, child-like wife, yet fails to see her needs, as, married too young, she slaves away at household tasks, too busy to show Gus the love and attention he craves, and with tell-tale sign of stress in the perpetual respiratory problems which may well be psychosomatic.

Apart from helping on the farm, Gus spends his summer caring for the stray dove which has lost its wings in a mishap, exercising Bagatelle, his grandfather’s semi-catatonic, incontinent old draught horse (whose droppings he has to collect), sparring with his disdainful elder sister Léa, half-playing, half-fumbling with the quirky adolescent Mado who pursues him with persistence, all the while slipping into a cartoon-like fantasy world. There is a good deal of irony and humour in all this, as when Gus imagines that the giant, windowless chicken incubator is a mysterious distant planet whose toxic atmosphere contains mutant bacteria with the power to penetrate his tissues in the cunning intention of assuming his appearance.

In reality, it is his stable world that is penetrated by the arrival of his mother’s new friend Cécile, the provocative, opinionated sun-tanned hippy, supposedly needing a place to stay after splitting up with her husband. The story then gathers pace and builds inexorably to a crisis worthy of Thomas Hardy in his darkest mood, or a Greek tragedy. I found the final chapter something of an anti-climax, but perhaps as “the calm after the storm” it was effective. If it struck a note of resignation, a sense of our insignificance in the scale of things, that is maybe what the author intended.