“I go to church but I don’t believe in God. He goes to prison but is not a criminal.” p. 97
We Begin at the End is a great story, and Chris Whitaker conveys small-town life both realistically and tragically. Duchess Day Radley, the thirteen-year-old self-declared outlaw who is a protagonist in this novel, sometimes uses contrived language, but her disillusionment and detachment from others are palpable. The reader can’t help but perceive the sadness and despair that Duchess and her six-year-old brother Robin experience as their mother, Star Radley, first struggles to make a living and then dies from gunshot wounds.
The story is a whodunit novel, but it also provides some profound statements about modern life and cultural issues that have been repeated for generations. Walk, the police chief in the fictional town of Cape Haven, California, the other protagonist, is a man who exemplifies the steadfast nature of small-town life. His undying loyalty to his childhood friend, Vincent King, is relatable yet makes him seem naive and overridden with guilt since, as an aspiring police officer, he turned in his friend. As the story begins, Vincent is released from prison after serving a 30-year sentence for accidentally killing Sissy, Star Radley’s sister, his high school sweetheart. While in prison, he also killed another person. Central to the plot is whether Vincent is a cold-blooded murderer, as many believe, or the good guy that Walk contends.
Small town residents are often impervious to change and immovable in so many ways. A few instances in the story point out that both Walk and Martha, his high school girlfriend with whom he reacquaints after thirty years, resisted change. We find out early in the story that Walk has Parkinson’s and tries to hide it from everybody. I had to wonder how that related to his unwavering commitment to his friends and his difficulty with change. It seemed that he did not know much about modern police work. He relied on relationships and favors instead of procedures and evidence. Perhaps his body’s failure gave him a broader message about his career’s demise, and I think the author provided a modern statement about some police professionals’ cluelessness.
In addition to the theme of change, or lack thereof among the characters, there is a theme related to nurturing and raising children, especially those with absent or deceased parents. The story’s plot involves two children who needed parenting. Their mother provided little nurturing after being abandoned by her mother by suicide and her father moving to Montana. At first glance, Duchess is the mother figure, nurturing not only Robin but also her mother. As the story unfolds and the children are brought to live with Hal, the estranged grandfather, readers begin to see the obvious inability of a thirteen-year-old to take so much responsibility. Hal garners sympathy from readers as he attempts to break the cycle of parental neglect in his family. Of course, Duchess’s enemies from the small town interfere with creating a reformed life for the children. Whitaker introduces two stereotypic characters with aptronyms to flesh out the Duchess character. Still, it takes more plot development to realize the value of both Dolly, the church lady, and Thomas Noble, a boy in Duchess’s class who is black and suffers from symbrachydactyly. Further social statements are made through the child welfare worker who is well-intentioned but works with damaged children in a broken system.
In some unconventional ways, Dickie Darke, a villain in the story, shows greater character depth than Walk and others on the side of the law admit. It bothered me that the Chief of Police ignored Duchess’s crime that affected Darke. I think Whitaker was trying to make a statement about police bias, favoritism, and preconceived notions.
I wondered about the choice of character names. With the choice of the surname Radley for Sissy, Star, Duchess, and Robin, Whitaker may have been alluding to Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. Boo’s innocence was robbed from him in that classic story, and the Radleys in We Begin at the End are indeed victims of stolen childhood.
Many questions about the human spirit are posed through the characters, their current lives, and backstories. Was a child such as Duchess born with deep-seated hatred? Can she reform? What about Vincent? Is he evil? Is Walk as good as he seems? Are good and bad truly binary, or is there a continuum? I strongly suggest you read this book in which the characters are so realistic. They force us to consider so many age-old human dilemmas.
