The Friendship

On the face of it Ara and Kit, two girls in the village school, have nothing in common. Ara, the elder, is large, earthy and illiterate; Kit, her junior, is lean, brainy and interested in abstractions. Ara likes animals; Kit just reads and thinks. If the two continue to see one another when they have grown up and left school, it is because Kit cannot leave her friend alone. She is irresistibly drawn to her. The inarticulate but intuitive Ara has a soothing effect on Kit who, in turn, acts as a stimulus on Ara. In Connie Palmen's brilliant novel of ideas, the story of their friendship is told through the eyes of Kit, and it describes with astonishing precision just how a person, and especially a person growing up, is the battleground on which the obsessive claims of the mind and the instincts strive for domination.