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Chloe Hooper
Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted pupil, Lucien. Unnervingly, her lover’s wife has just published Murder at Black Swan Point, a true crime novel about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress. When Lucien displays violent imagery in his crayon sketches, Kate wonders how well her pupil understands his mother’s grisly work, and why he’s exposed to it. Suspecting the adult account of Black Swan Point’s murder to be wrong, Kate imagines her own version of the novel, for children, narrated by Australian animals. But has her obsession with the crime aligned her fate with…
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Chloe Hooper was born in 1973, and educated at the University of Melbourne and Columbia University, New York, where she studied creative writing under Philip Roth. She lives in Australia.
topAbout the Book
Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted pupil, Lucien. Unnervingly, her lover’s wife has just published Murder at Black Swan Point, a true crime novel about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress. When Lucien displays violent imagery in his crayon sketches, Kate wonders how well her pupil understands his mother’s grisly work, and why he’s exposed to it. Suspecting the adult account of Black Swan Point’s murder to be wrong, Kate imagines her own version of the novel, for children, narrated by Australian animals. But has her obsession with the crime aligned her fate with that of the murdered adulteress? Chloe Hooper brilliantly portrays a young woman reluctant to enter or conform to the world of adults. Kate Byrne is compelled by the lives of her nine-year-old students, a misfit among their parents. And though Lucien’s father brings her to life sexually in scenes of escalating eroticism, he does nothing to penetrate her obsession with the past. Kate is fixated on the crime of passion that occurred years earlier, less and less aware of her own reputation in the present.
topChloe Hooper interview/review
Orange Prize for Fiction – Shortlist 2002 Interview
- What sparked A Child’s Book of True Crime?
For a first time novelist, interested in the machinations of human behaviour – and looking for stories – true crimes provide fascinating insights into people’s desires, and ambitions, and pathologies at their most raw. I started reading true crime books, and was struck by the true crime writer’s delicate balancing act: at once he, or she, must cater to the reader’s more gory appetites, whilst also bending backwards to show horror at the grisly deed. This formula seemed to me ripe for a satire.
I started writing Murder at Black Swan Point, the book-within-the-book which runs through my novel. Unfortunately though, this parody of a true crime novel seemed to be reading too much like a true crime novel. At the time I was a poor graduate student living in New York, doing a lot of babysitting. A few nights a week I was reading aloud bedtime stories. Lightning struck, or the penny dropped, and it occurred to me that reframing this faux true-crime book as a children’s story might be the way forward.
- Kate’s story is interspersed with her fantasy tale of a team of animal detectives working to solve a local murder case. What is their function in the novel?
Their appearance in the novel has a two-fold function. As I mentioned, I wanted to write a satire of a true crime novel, and melding the two genres seemed to be the most electric way of making a comment on the perversities of true crime.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- As an elementary school teacher, Kate straddles both the world of adults and of children. How do her personality and behaviour reflect this split? How does her version of the Black Swan Point murder story mix the two worlds?
- How does the world within Kate’s children’s stories differ from the world she encounters outside the classroom and what does this reveal about her character?
- What are the key differences between Kate and Veronica’s versions of the Black Swan Point story and what might this illustrate about the two women?
- Children understand tragedy in a way adults are unable to. Is there something cruel about telling children crime stories, which they will then vividly imagine? Are there elements of cruelty in Kate’s nature?
- Discuss the scene in which Kate drives off the road in the old Mercedes and has to seek help from a local man. What makes this scene so unsettling? How does the author achieve such tension?
- Images and stories of sex permeate the novel, and so do images and tales of death. What does the author suggest about the relationship between sex – especially illicit sex – and violence and death?
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Suggested Further Reading
- Secret History ~ Donna Tartt
- The Cutting Room ~ Louise Welsh
- Bel Canto ~ Ann Patchett
- Hotel World ~ Ali Smith
- The Little Friend ~ Donna Tartt
- The Corrections ~ Jonathan Franzen