Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Pack Up the Moon by Rachael Herron

Like the poem from which it takes its title, W H Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’, which contains the despondent line “Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun”, Rachael Herron’s latest novel deals with grief and devastation.

Pack Up the Moon is no dirge, however, thanks to the mood of hopefulness set when artist Kate Monroe, who lost her nine-year-old son Robin and her marriage in quick succession, is tracked down at her new exhibition in California by Pree, the daughter she adopted out as a teenager and whose existence she never revealed to her husband Nolan. Now 22, Pree has plenty of questions and a burgeoning secret of her own.

The young woman is a light-hearted soul who recognizes her own good fortune in being handed off to two new mothers, Isi and Marta, who retain as strong a recollection of her birth as any biological mother and have endowed her with unconditional love. She is nonetheless making the predictable mistakes of youth, flirting with her boss and failing to disclose her pregnancy to her long-time boyfriend, Flynn, with whom she lives in an artists’ collective (like her relationship, the commune makes a romantic promise unmatched by prosaic reality). Pree and Kate, it is implied, may each save the other from loneliness and ennui.

But who will rescue Nolan, in the most impoverished position of all? He spent three years in prison following Robin’s death and is now “living a dead man’s life”, working in a road gang and unable to shake the conviction that he should not be alive. The central conflict of Pack Up the Moon is Kate’s denial of her enduring love for Nolan, her determination that she can do nothing but “find the method of hating him” for her loss.

Nolan is engaged in no such self-deception, but accepts, with poignant resignation, his new life, a netherworld of self-flagellation and regret in which his only contact with Kate is in the exchange of emails that consist solely of memories of their son.

It’s a brutal and convincing set-up, Herron presenting the former couple as driftless wanderers, broken by their son’s death and baffled that their lives have surpassed that of Robin. It is a long way from the giddy romance of their youthful elopement and a vivid depiction of the utter destruction wrought by the death of a child. Her work as a 911 dispatcher has taught Herron about despair, and diligent research and personal interviews about the experiences of those on each corner of the adoption process.

The benefits of this investigation are seen in the character of Pree, who quietly observes the mannerisms she shares with Kate while disguising her anger at how much has been withheld, leading her to wonder whether she is the product of rape or incest.

Though Nolan is no insignificant character, Pack Up the Moon is most of all about motherhood, the love that only intensifies after loss and the ties that bind Pree as strongly to her adoptive mothers as to the woman who gave her life. Herron also evokes the complexity of grief, Kate feeling “an envy so thick and viscous she could almost see it” on contemplating the easeful death of her son.

That she stops short of action is to the great benefit of Herron’s story, which is afforded a plausibly upbeat ending. Life, after all, goes on.