The Syringa Tree by Pamela Gien

Who knew how hard a little softness could hurt?

Pamela Gien’s The Syringa Tree is a heart-wounding masterwork of the gentlest sort, a treat of sweet storytelling that settles around us like the subtlest blanket, catching our hearts in a beautiful, painful, moving tale about growing up during South Africa’s period of apartheid. Its heroine is six-year old Lizzie, through whose eyes we experience a world in which race divisions tear families apart, anyone might be taken away by night, and no one knows what “freedom” and “bravery” really mean.

At first, Gien’s placidly soothing style of writing makes the story seem almost too quiet, its early pages filled with nearly mind-numbingly mild descriptions of the South African landscape. But once that is past and Gien settles into her narration of Lizzie’s childhood — a childhood of tree-climbing, wish-making, and especially, pretending to be a monkey — the novel evolves into a perfectly cozy read for a quiet afternoon. For the first half of the story, at least.

And then the comforting security of Gien’s storytelling reveals itself to be no more than surface gentleness — as if she has wrapped her blanket around us simply as consolation for the tragic events she must describe. The remainder of the novel is a burning freefall, a poignant unraveling of Lizzie’s world as she suffers the losses of her dearest loved ones, one after another, either through their deaths or their desertions of her.

What makes this hurt so much, what Gien achieves more brilliantly than anything else, is that we genuinely love her characters. Lizzie, for example, steals our hearts from the start, immediately lovable for the way she faces all the hardships her world offers: “I knitted my grandfather’s words with those of my father into a simple wish that the world would right itself, and since no one was looking, I emptied the sugar bowl upside down over my cup, turning my tea into brown sludge.” Moments like this, in which Lizzie interprets the adult world with a child’s simple faith, are the little bursts that brighten the novel’s early pages, keeping us eager for the next smile Lizzie will bring.

Of course, our attachment to the novel’s other characters is equally crucial to Gien’s discussion of South Africa’s political atmosphere at the time. The murder of Lizzie’s grandfather is only devastating because we recall how the kind, hardworking man taught Lizzie about hope — for, he says, the little white specks on her fingernails mean that lucky things will happen to her — a lesson Lizzie cherishes through the most difficult times of her childhood. But for her happiest times, Lizzie has Salamina, her nanny, who functions as a sort of second mother to Lizzie because her biological mother is often too depressed to get out of bed. When Salamina disappears one morning without saying goodbye, we can hardly bear the fact that we will no longer be soothed by the warmth of her arms, no longer hear her voice affectionately calling, “Monkey!” to a mischievous Lizzie.

But perhaps the most agonizing event of all is the death of Moliseng, Salamina’s daughter. When Moliseng is born illegally inside Lizzie’s house, the entire family works to hide the baby because her discovery would mean that she must be sent to live in Soweto, a much poorer, more dangerous neighborhood — the neighborhood reserved for blacks. It becomes Lizzie’s “special job” to keep Moliseng safe.

Years later, after Salamina and Moliseng have deserted Lizzie, the climactic Soweto massacre of 1976 results in Lizzie reading Moliseng’s name in the newspaper — as a casualty, dead at the age of 14. Dead, a symbol of courage, a symbol of freedom, a symbol of those who refuse to hide any longer.

Or, in Lizzie’s mind, a symbol of everything she cannot understand about the country she calls home. Heartbroken, she runs away from South Africa — but we know she will return. For this story of loss is also a story of forgiveness and strength. As a grown-up Lizzie must learn, one’s childhood can never be abandoned, one’s home and family never truly rejected. No matter how hard it hurts, it always heals.