Sometimes, being a dog — free to roam and sniff and run as you please — is easier than being a girl, always being monitored, with expectations of domesticity and meekness heavy on your shoulders.
Xenobe Purvis’ eerie “The Hounding” is the story of the five Mansfield sisters, whom the villagers of Little Nettlebed have pegged as literal dogs; there are even a couple of not-so-trustworthy eye witnesses to the “fact” of their human-to-dog transformation.
As opposed to hearing the girls tell their own story, we see it unfold through the eyes of five villagers: four men and one woman. I thought it was really interesting that we never get the girls’ perspectives — if not a little obvious as to the messaging of the book, which is that their perspectives are consistently ignored.
From the ferryman of the drying-up river to the owner and barmaid of the local pub to the new hay hand on the Mansfields’ farm, each has their own opinion of the girls. Pete Darling, described as the greatest hater of all, especially hates the girls. He believes that they know nothing of frustration and suffering, that he is the only one who experiences it.
The barmaid, Temperance, seems to want to protect the girls, reflecting on what girls and women go through each day: “The great, gruelling trial of being a woman in a world governed by men. How painful it was, and how humiliating.” The hay hand, Thomas, is in love with Anne Mansfield, the eldest of the girls. We get to see him falling for Anne and trying to protect her from the increasingly violent villagers.
Sometimes, Purvis is a little too on the nose in describing how odd the girls and Little Nettlebed are. Instead of showing us their oddities, one of Purvis’ characters tells us there is an unnaturalness to Little Nettlebed that hung in the air, lingered behind windows, that the girls haunted the borders of the village.
The actions of the girls don’t seem especially peculiar. Sure, they go almost everywhere together as a quintet, sometimes do not respond to villagers when addressed and do not participate in village goings-on as much as members of the community would like them to. But I would have liked to be shown the girls acting unusually. We are constantly told how bizarre they are, but it seems they are normal girls who struggle under the watchful eye of a judgmental community.
The time period is never clarified in “The Hounding,” but we can assume it is around 1600, due to comments made about a new object where you are able to see the stars up close. One character says girls have been called witches, and have been killed for it, in her lifetime. As a reader, it was fun being in “no man’s land” for a while, before the hints about the place and time started to creep in. It almost seemed like a village separate from space and time, its own bubble of strangeness and eccentricities.
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