The Land of Decoration

By Grace McCleen 

(Henry Holt)

According to her website, author Grace McCleen grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household in Britain. Encouraged by teachers on a path she had not set her sights on, a university education, she attended Oxford, only to lose her faith and fragile sense of self. Judging by her semiautobiographical first novel, “The Land of Decoration,” she has been saved by writing, if not restored to salvation.

The book’s title comes from the Book of Ezekiel, where God proclaims to the Israelites that he will lead them out of captivity into a land flowing with milk and honey, “the decoration of all the lands.” Judith McPherson, the friendless 10-year-old only child who narrates this story, spends most after-school time in her bedroom creating a miniature land of decoration. Though based on her scruffy English industrial town, she transforms it into a scale model of the heavenly paradise to be ushered in by the End Times.

In the post-Armageddon near future, Judith expects to be reunited with her mother, who died in childbirth. In the present, however, she faces the ugly reality of constant bullying by Neil Lewis and other classmates intolerant of her religion. Her strict, humorless father advises her to leave Neil to God’s judgment. That’s not enough for Judith, who believes herself to be God’s Instrument, capable of creating miracles.

What follows is part scary young-adult novel, part Job-like Biblical narrative and ― given this God’s informal colloquialisms ― Borscht Belt comedy routine. What makes it cohere, for the most part, is McCleen’s savvy understanding of a mind that is young but smart. Judith’s intelligence and curiosity trump any narrow theological perspective.

If the clear-cut dichotomy between good guys and bad lends the book a YA simplicity, the prose raises the bar far higher. Judith isn’t merely a harassed kid but a budding Emily Dickinson. Her sensibility conveys a girlish innocence elevated by intelligence and stunned by raw experience.

“All the important things, like whether someone loves you ... aren’t certain,” Judith understands, “so we try to believe them, whereas all the things you don’t have to wonder about, like gravity ... you can bet your life on but you don’t have to.”

Psychologists can enlighten us about the true believer’s mind, but it takes a novelist like McCleen to fully fathom it. She summons not only an atmosphere of claustrophobia and impending doom but a longing for union with the divine and the desire to do good. However freakish Judith and her father’s actions may seem to outsiders, they stem from an internally consistent world view.

Judith’s “miracles” do seem to make things happen, for better or worse. When events start spinning out of control, though, her faith begins to falter. The God she trusted proves unreliable and unforgiving. She will have to redefine the miraculous.

As tribulations multiply for Judith and her father ― hooligans ruin their garden, he is ostracized for scabbing during a strike ― they hunker down in a siege mentality. Their most vicious foe may be this fundamentalist God himself. “I asked God if it was my fault Mother died,” Judith reports, “and He said that it was.” (MCT)