Book Review - Delia Owens - Where The Crawdads Sing

Tweet

(Minor spoilers) A 2018 novel that inspired a 2022 movie I have not seen yet, though the book is free to download on Youtube audios. It’s both a coming of age story and a crime story, (with a twist that is not too difficult to work out though it doesn’t spoil the narrative when you do). More controversially, the book echoes a real life crime drama as the author and her family are dominant suspects in a an actual ongoing murder investigation in Zambia. The title refers to crayfish, and the idea that the main character should aim to get out deeper into the natural world where animals are truly wild, and unaffected by human interference. In such a pure nature wild place, it might mystically be possible to hear the generally silent crawdads singing. The main protagonist is Kya, seen at various stages in her life. Orphaned early on, she lives in the marsh communities on the North Carolina coastal flood regions. She is largely isolated, self-sufficient, and self educated, and regarded as a pariah by many in the community. Her one true friend is a boy called Tate who teaches her to read before he leaves the marshes to go to university. Years later, Tate returns to find he has a rival for Kya’s affections, a semi-celebrity status football sexist slob quarterback called Chase. When Chase is found dead in the swamp by the police, Kya becomes the main suspect in the police investigation that dominates the second half of the book, allegations she strenuously denies. The echoes with the life of Delia Owens are startling. Author and protagonist are environmentalist champions with literary ambitions, some cynical disregard for other people, and both becoming suspects in serious criminal investigations. The true events date from 1995 when a fly on the wall documentary crew went to Zambia to make a film about the Owens family’s passionate campaign against ivory poachers there. The stance taken by Mark Owens, (Delia’s now ex-husband) was to have a shoot to kill policy towards poachers, and the Owens’s trained local men to work in zero-tolerance stance anti-poaching patrol groups. While filming one such group in action, the camera crew actually caught the apparent gunshot execution of a suspected poacher on film, though the victim was unidentified (the body was hidden after filming was completed, and never found) and the gunman responsible was never specifically identified, though Christopher Owens (Mark Owens’s son from his first marriage) is regarded as direct suspect number one. As a result of the outrage the film generated, the Zambian authorities issued warrants for the arrests of the three Owens’s who fled the country, settling in the US declining to respond to requests for their return to Africa for questioning ever since. Now Delia Owens is an author, creating work about a reclusive lady with a strong love of nature, mistrust of people, and implicated in a mysterious murder. Truth is stronger than fiction, and the novel is genuinely beautiful in its evocation of the marshland environment that is displayed throughout. Youtube reading of the full novel Arthur Chappell