What kind of innate sensitivity would make the very young Shannon Burns cling to a book almost 200 years old from the other side of the world?Credit:
By the age of five,young Shannon had learnt some hard lessons. He was not wanted;his mother lied to his father to make him accept someone else’s child as his own. He was subject to horrific emotional and physical abuse,including hunger,violence,sexual trauma,emotional manipulation,deceit and exclusion. It makes difficult reading,an experience softened by the fact that you are reading it and therefore a vulnerable kid has survived to tell the tale.
Burns is a clean and honest storyteller in a way that the adults around him were not. He never reverts to the destructive language that must have been his emotional mother tongue. He has taught himself a bright,crisp and fearless way of communicating.
Childhood by Shannon Burns.
The northern suburbs of Adelaide were a tough place in the nineties. Jimmy Barnes describes the same locale in an earlier time inWorking Class Boy. There are resonances between the two books and the violent and dysfunctional families they carry. Barnes found music. Burns found reading.
They both needed an escape hatch. Barnes was helped to his,starting with singing Christmas carols. Burns’ lucky break was his character,which included an ability to pull an invisible armour around himself. By the end of the first part ofChildhood he has discovered what he describes as the only reliable truth he can depend on. “No-one can be trusted. I am on my own.”
Once the book reaches this point,it changes to a third-person narrative. The central character is now “the boy”,seldom even called by name. A reader wonders about the kind of relationship this implies. Perhaps for safety,Burns finds a need to keep that unfortunate kid at arm’s length. “Let’s say he has never spoken about the weeping he did with anyone. Let’s say that he never will.”
He makes other findings as well. Burns taught himself to read before starting school. The pivot of the book is his discovery ofFrankenstein. Up to that point,he has devoured pulp fiction. He knows immediately thatFrankenstein is something else. “There are numerous possible lessons or meanings,and the language is appealingly foreign … It doesn’t yield to him … because it leaves him uncertain and unsettled,it lingers.”