Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel award having already been winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize (its inclusion on the longlist drawing me to this Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel award having already been winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize (its inclusion on the longlist drawing me to this book)
Winter lays down hard frosts, vitrifying the roads and the rooftops, enforcing seclusion and imposing fasts. Pigs freeze to death in their pens. News slows to a trickle. Letters go astray and are intercepted, the heart’s-blood missives of young lovers and the sober bulletins of generals alike. The rumour is that both armies are quartered away for Christmastide, but no definitive word on this subject arrives. An army is a very large thing to lose; losing two begins to look like carelessness. While marching orders and tactical directives deliquesce on the brumal winds, the pyrotechnics of imminent apocalypse shimmer just as rosily on the ice-bound horizon as they ever did. In Ipswich, a sorceress is seen shrieking down the Orwell on a pole, wielding lightning bolts. …………… In Manningtree itself there have been most strange and inexplicable happenings that could be accounted for only by infernal malice.
This book was recently included on a very impressive longlist for the Desmond Elliott Prize for Debut fiction which prompted me to read it.
This is a fictionalised account of a dark period in English history – the actions of the so-called “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins, who for a brief period in an East Anglia convulsed by the Civil War, effectively revised the idea of witchcraft trials, widely quoted as being responsible in just 2-3 years for as many executions from witchcraft as seen in England in the previous 150 years.
The book is set in the eponymous Essex town where his crusade began and is effectively narrated by one of his accused – Rebecca West, a young girl, arrested for witchcraft with her widowed mother (who was believed by Hopkins to be at the centre of the witches activity with another elderly eccentric – Elizabeth Clark). Sometimes directly in the first person, sometimes with Rebecca imagining or recounting scenes she hears about but does not participate in, and sometimes in more of a third party narrator style.
The outline of the story that follows is in some ways terribly familiar – not least to anyone who, like me, studied Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” for A-Level: arguments, allegations, hysterical reactions, accusations, arrests, confessions – forced or tactically volunteered, recantations, trials, and executions. And of course it was Hopkins actions and treatises which partly inspired the Salem trials.
The book is clearly the subject of detailed and (as far as I can) very accurately rendered research and yet this this is not one of those historical fiction books where either dialogue is used for historical exposition or the narrator’s voice hijacked to cram in some research. And the historical fact is blended with imagination and with gentle (and far from over-laboured) allusions to contemporary relevance – allusions the author allows the reader to form for themselves.
The author conveys brilliantly the tensions, petty jealousies, long-held resentments and class/gender biases of the town which of course form the soil in which the accusations and insinuations of witchcraft can be planted and allowed to flourish.
The author does examine what might have caused the actions of Hopkins as well as those that encouraged or at least did not hinder him.
Partly this is the background of the times: the natural order of divine rule of Kings being overturned by Parliament; a fierce iconoclastic reaction (inspired by both patriotism and direct access to the scriptures) against the perceived perversions of Popery; villages and towns largely devoid of fighting-fit men, both removing their protection from their womenfolk and surely making those of an age left behind feeling a need to prove their prowess and power. I was reminded in some of Hopkins (and his associates) views – in their simultaneous hatred of and obsession with women of the present day Incel movement.
And all of this is shot through with fear of the present and future, and with a religiously fanatically view which is long on judgment and short on mercy (it was for me very telling that Hopkins almost obsessive biblical quotations seem to omit the gospels almost entirely, and pretty well the New Testament) and a fanatical belief in providence which struggles to explain the vicissitudes of normal existence as not being of diabolic design.
But what the book is really about (as the author says in the Afterword) is the “fears, hopes, desires and insecurities of the women who scratched out their existence on the very edges of society, and who have otherwise gone voiceless, or else been muted by victimhood.”
And the author does a brilliant job, principally by the wonderful character of Rebecca in capturing their voices – their (again her words) “character, humour and pride”.
We see through Rebecca how impossible it is to avoid accusations of witchcraft once placed: how for example she asks can she provide an alibi if she can apparently be in two places at once via transportation, or supposedly carry out her nefarious schemes at a distance via invisible imps; and how she asks can she testify truthfully to save herself when “I can say again and again, a thousand times.. that I am not a witch and have not traffic with the Devil not his spirits, and it will account for nothing. But if I say once that I am, then it counts for everything”
The author is a poet and the language in the book is superbly and lyrically crafted – studded with quite beautiful writing, I have started and ended my review with two examples, but there are many more phrases (“the grass a hard enameled green in the low rays of sunshine, already a crust of young moon visible over the treetops”)
The reading experience is visceral, immersive and multi-sensory: you are really placed in the mind and body of the narrator; and in the smells, sights, touch, sounds of 1640s Essex.
True winter refuses to leave, tantrums, threatens to scatter abjection all over the country again. Dark clouds flex and leer above the cursed cities and empty fields with a renewed sense of commitment to pathetic fallacy. Riding high. The world seems his; he thought it would feel better than it does.
Highly recommended.
My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley...more
2022 update - yet another prize listing with the shortlist for the US National Book Critics Circle Autobiography award
--------------------------------2022 update - yet another prize listing with the shortlist for the US National Book Critics Circle Autobiography award
--------------------------------------------- Since my review now winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, and longlisted for the 2021 Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction. These nominations again showing how this book is part biographical, part fiction - something recognised I think explicitly by its nomination for the Gordon Burn Prize which specifically looks for books which blend the two forms.
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“I think of [starling’s] song, how deftly they regurgitate strands of true remembered sound, weaving it into their own melodic bridges: a fusion of truth and invention; past and present”
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize and shortlisting for the 2021 Folio Prize – although I was already familiar with it from its winning of the An Post Irish Book of the Year in 2020 – remarkably the third time in five years by its publisher Tramp Press who have (among others) published Mike McCormack’s “Solar Bones” (Goldsmith and Dublin Literary Award Winner) and a series of books by Sara Baume.
Tramp Press publish fiction, essays/non-fiction and a Forgotten Voices list which is “committed to rescuing and recovering forgotten literature, and to re-engaging with those writers”.
And interestingly this beautiful and heartfelt work stands at the intersection of all three of these areas – having already won prize nominations for both fiction and non-fiction due to its heavily auto-biographical/memoir/autofictional nature and being based around re-engaging with an older writer.
The author Doireann Ní Ghríofa is better known as a poet and her award winning collection “Clasp” examined the concept of palimpsest, of grief, of the joy and pain of motherhood – and featured in particular the poem “The Horse Under The Hearth” which is effectively a continuation of a famous 18th Century Irish keen (a lament) “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill – an elegy to Eibhlin’s soldier husband, murdered by an English Protestant Sheriff/magistrate over a dispute about a horse.
That poem was sparked from a love by the author not just of the poem itself but firstly a fascination with the writer as someone largely written out of history and known for her dead husband and her famous politician nephew (Daniel O’Connell) and secondly a strong sense of connection between her life and that of the poet.
This book – with its familiar refrain “THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT” is an exploration of a 21st Century auto-fictional narrator who reads and re-reads the poem, decides to translate it herself (the author’s translation with the original Gaelic is in the Appendix, and parts of the poem both accompany each chapter heading, give the book much of its narrative drive and appears frequently in the text.
This is also a book about motherhood and the giving and sacrifice involved – a U2 song (which the author hates but cannot dislodge) and its lyric of “you given yourself away” captures this idea and the narrator’s wider interest in sacrifice (the book starts for example with her pumping breast milk for premature babies – something which later takes on a much greater meaning for her; she continues to breast feed her daughter until almost forced to give up; she riffs on the Rapunzel Foundation – where girls grow their hair long before donating their ponytails to make wigs for those with hair loss).
The book is simply resplendent in repeated imagery.
There is, for example, the recurring themes of rooms – including how the narrator links it (via the Italian stanza) to the construction of a poem; on the concepts of desire; of how women in Irish history are in the “masculine shadow … only of interest as a satellite to male lives”
Starlings reappear – their ability to incorporate sounds into their song (as per my opening quote) conveying something of how the keen was first passed down verbally, of the author’s poem and of this novel.
There is discussion of how while male texts and the songs of bards were copied down to preserve them, “literature composed by women was stored not in books but in female bodies, living repositories of poetry and song”
Weaving and knitting feature – her first outing with her baby daughter to visit the site of the poem’s events we are told she is wearing a cardigan knitted by her grandmother “a female text in which every stitch is a syllable” and of course we immediately think of this book – a female text in which syllable is a stitch, a stitch in the historical picture the narrator is weaving. And later we are reminded that the etymology of “text” lies in the latin for “to weave” and how the famous poem “belongs to a literary genre worked an woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies”- a genre to which of course this book is proud to belong.
I could continue but will give only one more example. For me what really makes the 18th Century poem outstanding is the verse when the wife gallops to her husband’s still hemorrhaging dying body and unable to stem the blood, wipe or clean it “my palms turned cups, and oh I gulped”. And this terrible image of drinking blood – occurs twice in the narrator’s story at critical junctures. In hospital with her very premature daughter – and after a heel prick to draw blood and also to see if the baby will cry, she sucks the blood away from the heel. And at college, having studied hard and against school and family advice, to attend a medical/vet course at her first dissection she immediately cuts herself on a scalpel and retreats to suck the blood from the wound – the cutting incident starting the collapse of her original ambitions and a crucial turning point in her life.
The book has only one weakness – a lengthy chapter when, having exhausted the direct and secondary sources on Eibhlín and the site visits to understand more of her life, she decides to resort to relatively conventional genealogical tracings of her descendants. The failure itself (and the lack of interest in the chapter) I think does serve a purpose – it’s the only time when the text stops being a female text, as her quarry are entirely male and at the culmination of her searching she finds only a blank where her Eibhlín should be.
Overall this is a powerful and memorable book....more
Now as predicted shortlisted for the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize.
look at me now lost in linearity, where is the freedom in my head, to not to only have
Now as predicted shortlisted for the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize.
look at me now lost in linearity, where is the freedom in my head, to not to only have to move side to side, stuck in straight lines every morning once I’ve arrived in this office, breaking myself in every morning, having to loosen the numbness punch by punch but yes I can feel my head loosening, freeing, it’s always this way, numbness ebbs, visits, interrupts, but always gets pushed down eventually taking my head away, but always giving it back (or do I wrench it back? ….
This debut novel - now included in the influential annual Observer first novelist article - will I think be one of the most innovative I read in 2021 – and I would be not be surprised to see it featuring on Prize lists including the Goldsmith. The Goldsmith was of course won in its first year by Eimear McBride’s harrowing stream-of-consciousness novel “A Girl is a Half Formed Thing” which is the only time ever I have listened to an audiobook as a way of gaining entry to a book I had found it difficult to access in print (just for reference in a typical year I read around 150 novels and listen to 0 audiobooks) – allowing me then to read the novel.
So when I heard of this novel – with its experimental stream-of-consciousness rendering on the page of the thoughts of a woman suffering trauma, a book very much about voice and which it is impossible to read other than aloud in one’s head – I was delighted to be able to both buy the novel in print but also to source a copy of the Audiobook (narrated by the author herself) - with thanks to W.F. Howes Ltd via NetGalley.
The style of this book I should stress is very different – rather than McBride’s relentlessness assault of fragmentary sentences and inventive language, we have here intersecting, sometimes parallel, sometimes intervleaved threads of internal monologue but also What’s App exchanges, emails, trip advisor reviews, poems, railway annoucements, brief conversations – all written in everyday language, thought and speech. The look and particularly spacing of the text on the page is itself part of the effect- and very different again to McBride’s wall of text. And the voice too very different in both animation and accent (Southern English, twenty-something, well educated).
The unnamed narrator is an assistant for an unnamed international newspaper – and the story is one Friday in her life, starting with her awakening, slightly hungover, through to her drifting to post-coital sleep. Most of it takes place in her “dreaded” office – and much of the background detail will be very familiar to any London based white collar worker. There though, and what gives the book its propulsive power, the spectre of her sexist boss and a rape (which he blithely will not acknowledge and which the narrator has still not disclosed – including to her “Him” her boyfriend) hangs over her.
The form follows both from the book’s set up and from trying to capture the multi-tasking digital world in which we now exist, the author said in an FT article she authored on the art of fiction in the age of social media “When I started writing my own novel, incorporating this digital compulsion was one of the first issues I ran into. I was writing a book that aimed to follow the mind of a woman in her twenties, nonstop, so ignoring it would be a plot hole. But quickly, I found that it opened up my protagonist, created a portal to others while still keeping her isolated. It inspired me to shake up form; the pressures of an age of distraction making me break up prose into columns and fragments.”
The story originally started life as a prize shortlisted short story – and that story forms the midpoint of the day and is reproduced in full in the novel and gives a good sense of the book – much better than I think I have or can manage or that the formatting on Goodreads easily allows.
Even as I wrote the review it was tempting to refer to elements of the plot that fit closely what I understand of the author’s life and experiences (in a way I am all too conscious I am far more likely to do with a female rather than make author). And very knowingly by the author the one time when the book diverts to a WhatsApp group chat (otherwise the narrator leaves them unread, instead just communicating with her Mum and her Him) it is for a brief discussion on female auto-fiction.
Further then is a benign colleague in the book – who checks in on the narrator occasionally, especially when she senses she is particularly distressed – and this colleague is effectively, in many senses, I believe the author, rather than the narrator.
The text (as my opening and closing quotes show) brings in ideas of linearity (of lack of it) in thought and conventionality in writing (for example when the narrator finds some notes discarded by a colleague in the women’s toilet bin).
Overall I thought this was an excellent and impactful book treating an important if difficult subject –#MeToo and sexual assault in the workplace and female agency in the face of male obliviousness.
And finally to which media to approach it in ..
The author herself, announcing the upcoming audiobook, tweeted recently something which very much captured my different experiences with the novel and the audiobook “It was a strange thing to record as the text is so much about encouraging the reader to make decisions and learn patterns. Instead, it becomes a performance, but it still demands attention and, I think, works. I always heard it in a voice!”. If there is a difficulty in accessing the text it is in deciding how to read when there are two different sections interleaved – do you read each in series or attempt them in parallel (or – which I think is the most appropriate – pick according to context). The audiobook – while still retaining the idea of interleaving threads – makes this choice for you, which both brings you closer to the author’s own choices (and much closer to the narrator’s true voice) but also I think removes some of the reader’s agency.
So my recommendation – buy them both.
I know (even whilst thinking) that my writing would make more sense
diary entries that is – notes on experiences or feelings or whatever, not because my head is stable or makes particular sense as if but
when I write a diary (when I did) or notes (which has not been for a long time yes great I know) (no not since, nothing since) but when I did, it was always there – the other – the performance of writing! I write thinking someone is looking in, translate my thoughts into something a little prettier, more heightened than my actual head, context handily supplied ……….
… that’s why she is so terrifying no unsettling toilet bin note woman
… it’s all just nonsense, whirring, not connection and toilet woman thinks that’s fine ? is too obsessed or whatever to want to compose something
Further the author grew up with two first languages (Spanish and Swedish) and writes in a third – English and I think has spent time in South America before a Literature degree in Gothenburg and a MSc in Edinburgh.
The book is set in Edinburgh and features a young couple – Kristin and Ciaran and is predominantly written in the first person by Kristin but addressed to Cairan.
Kristin is a Swedish immigrant. She works at a immersive historical exhibition at a fictional Museum of (Scottish) Immigration in Edinburgh Castle – in which different people groups play the roles of their original forbears (for example a group of Lithuanian miners and Italian restauranters). Kristin and some fellow Scandinavians play Vikings – Kristin plays a character Solveig (and at one stage in the book the narrative briefly changes to a third party viewpoint of Solveig voiced by Kristin).
“We are examples. Joanne Tarbuck says, here to symbolise one of the many Peoples who made Scotland what it is, and to celebrate its rich cultural multiplicity”
The quirk of the exhibit is that the employees are required to speak only in their native language and pretend not to understand any questions from tourists in English – they are even meant to spend 20 minutes before starting work in isolation in a personal Translation Room (often say a small office or even a toilet cubicle) to leave their English speaking behind and mentally revert to their native language. This is course picks up on ideas of language barriers, and assimilation or language ghettos.
Ciaran was born into a Brazilian orphanage but adopted from there in Scotland as a child. He is a care worker doing home visits to the elderly – but also a passionate activist for climate change (and related causes) and with a hobby as a preserver of animals.
The situation of the book is that Ciaran suddenly decides to learn Swedish in reaction to the news that Kristin is in the early stages of pregnancy – and throws himself at it in a fully immersive way (watching and listening to Swedish radio and television, seeking Bergman films, putting post it notes on household objects) – and this immediately introduces tension in the relationship as Kristin, seeing Swedish speaking as her job, wants to only speak English at home which takes away a key part of the immersive experience for Ciaran.
Cairan’s enthusiasm for Swedish – and the mapping of his interest in the preservation of animals and his views on the extinction rebellion, to the preservation of language ….
A question for you: in the great range of Great danger, how high do you think an endangered language ranks, especially if it’s not really endangered, only its ego.
… leaves him, ostensibly a left wing activist, naively (and to Kristin’s disgust) voicing the views of (what she realises are extreme right-wing) Swedish groups on the preservation of Swedish from American/English influences. And to watch documentaries “about the fifteenth century, when Sweden was a European super-power” – again ironical from someone you know (without being told) would be much more attuned to misplaced nostalgia for British imperialism.
Ciaran’s studies though does cause Kristin to reflect on the quirks of English (with a particular emphasis on expressions she finds misleading – for example being sick which she sees as expelling sickness) and to reexamine her native Swedish (with a particular emphasis here on the etymology of compound words – as with all native speakers the make-up of these is far less obvious than it is to non native speakers).
The text often features Swedish and English side by side as Kristin puts the languages and her own response to them alongside each other – interestingly sometimes words are missed from the translation – particularly towards the end. Those I Googled seemed mainly about mothers and children (which I think draws on the ambiguity of both Kristin and Cairan to parenthood – the latter voices some of the ideas behind the author’s Birth Strike) although I suspect other omissions pick up different themes.
At work tension exists between the different people groups – competing for example over the popularity of their exhibits and who gets to lead the annual parade through the festival. Kristin proposes that her character becomes pregnant which leads to her manager buying a convincing “fat suit” and some of the other groups stealing the idea albeit with knock-off versions of the suit – and again the ideas of parenthood and conflict over it come out as well as the ideas of cultural identity and rivalry.
So as I hope the introduction shows this is a book that brings a myriad of admirable opinions and influences to bear on its writing. And I hope also how my review gives some ideas on how these map to this unusual book and how the novel explores issues such as language, communication and cultural identity.
Conceptually then the book is excellent – but I felt the execution was lacking. I simply did not enjoy reading the book anywhere near as much as reviewing it (as an aside that also went for half the Booker shortlist this year).
The issue for me here is that the ideas simply did not coalesce into what I found a convincing or coherent form – I felt like the novel was always slipping away from me. Further Cairan feels an undeveloped character (particularly his heritage) while the interactive exhibit which comes to dominate the book felt to often somewhere between far-fetched and farcical.
Nevertheless a fascinating if flawed debut novel from what I think will turn out to be a very interesting author.
My thanks to Scribe UK for an ARC via NetGalley...more
Now longlisted for the 2021 Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction
“I’m sure the life you’re living, set against the way you were raised, is giving
Now longlisted for the 2021 Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction
“I’m sure the life you’re living, set against the way you were raised, is giving you plenty to think about, and writing is the best way to order one’s thoughts, so keep it going”
This book was sourced and published by Sharmaine Lovegrove and her Dialogue book imprint with Little Brown.
Paul Mendez, the author, has in the past worked as a actor and voice actor (in particular recording the audio book for Ian Wright’s autobiography). He has said that one thing that particularly inspired him to write was the character of Leo in Alan Hollinghurst’s “Line of Beauty”, and it was while acting that part that he met the author of that Booker prize winning book (who is now his partner).
Like many debut novels this book has strong autobiographical roots. Its main third party narrator is Jesse: like the author Jesse grows up as a Jehovah’s witness (although unlike the author, via a white stepfather) and is effectively expelled from that fellowship at age 17 and then travels on to London (in Jesse’s case, 6 months later in 2002: in Mendez’s 5 years later in 2004) where, among other things, he becomes a sex worker.
Jesse’s first week in London includes these two events
But the book starts some 43 years earlier and with a bravura and beautifully written section featuring Norman Alonso, a member of the Windrush generation, born in Jamaica. An ex-boxer, he also in Jamaica becomes a naturally talented gardener – getting a job as private gardener to the owner of a large plantation house – and the same talents in England (where he moves to the Black Country) initially enable him to gain a good job with the council (and a strong relationship with his boss) and an associated council house. But by the time when the first section is narrated (in the first person) racial harassment has caused him to quit his job and on setting blindness has meant he stays at home trying to look after his young children (including his son Robert) while his wife works.
This section is excellent – the tale in some ways is a familiar one but the Black County setting and the gardening angle mean that Mendez gives it a fresh new perspective and Norman is a perceptive observer of himself, others and of English society and the contradictions between (and dishonesty within) the post war government’s immigration policies and their public rhetoric .
The section also cleverly foreshadows elements of Jesse’s story: in particular the ambiguity of Norman’s relationship with two older, single white men (the plantation owner and council boss); less obviously, he and his wife are unsettled by a railway suicide – their first hint that all is not well in the promised land – and a similar unsettling incident occurs early in Jesse’s time in London.
It is then something of a shock to the reader when the story jumps after 50 or so pages to 2002 – and Jesse in London, with a sexual encounter with a sensitive and concerned client, that is described in graphic and celebratory detail.
Autobiographically inspired novels have the advantage of authenticity of voice and story – the recounting of the life of a young black man, having had his racial and sexual identity and desires largely (if not entirely) suppressed, suddenly finding (and realising he may as well take commercial advantage of) the sexual of early 21st Century London is raw and urgent – and turns an unflinching gaze on sexuality and sex.
The way in which the account also captures the depressingly wide spectrum of overt and covert racism to which Jesse is subject, is also very well done, the racism acting as almost a constant undercurrent to all aspects of his London life in a way that is perhaps even worse than the more blatant racism he experienced growing up in Dudley.
Jesse’s reflections on his relationship with his now completely estranged parents and in particular what he sees as the gradual betrayal of him by his mother is powerful, and even if one-sided, it I think reflects the pain of some strongly remembered incidents in which his self-worth is, in stages, destroyed.
But if there is a common fault with debut novels (particularly autobiographical ones) it is the tendency to include too much detail. And in this case, the unflinching gaze is deployed too other areas of the novel. As a result I found far too much of the surrounding writing in this, main, section poorly executed.
The book is often an extreme case of tell now show, and the dialogue is very unconvincing: far too often, as it seemingly concerned that the reader may not understand the allusions, it feels like the author is addressing readers directly via his characters, who give explanations – a classic example is when Owen (Jesse’s eventual partner- and as an aside having a third character remark on the combination of names does not excuse their choice) recommends a book by Huysmans.
I also struggled with the reproduction of accents – capturing Patois and Jesse’s Black Country accent when he first goes to London, can, I can see, be said to further the book – but, at least for a period, it seems every accent is reproduced : the nadir being a French waitress in a restaurant (the two sections set in restaurants being classic examples of the extraneous details which should have been edited from the book).
Mendez is excellent in capturing music: how Jesse reacts to music when he reads it for the first time; how certain songs adopt Proustian Powers for him; how his parent’s unwillingness for him to listen to black music lead to him learning from other at school and ending up a “black boy trying to be a white boy trying to be a black boy” – but even there much of the power of the music was ruined for me by the way in which the characters take turns explaining to each other (but really to us) the background to the music or the band playing it. (Again – having one character ask another if he is a music agent given all of the detail provided is not an excuse for doing this).
At the book’s end (after possibly the low point over a dinner party scene) the two story lines of Norman and Jesse are neatly bought together.
A book which I think could have been better, albeit one which I think will feature on many book awards. And a brief episode at a literary book award is one of the highlights of the second part of the book....more
Now longlisted for the 2021 Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction and for the 2021 Women's Prize
I found this book to be on one level a blend betweenNow longlisted for the 2021 Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction and for the 2021 Women's Prize
I found this book to be on one level a blend between Ottessa Moshfegh and Caolinn Hughes.
The author is I believe a fan of Ottessa Moshfegh – this book draws on some similar ideas and psychological themes to “Eileen” and “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” but without the grotesqueness and scatological details. This month the author tweeted “What I love about Ottessa Moshfegh is that we are think we’re Eileen when Eileen’s sole theme, basically without digression, is that only Eileen is fully cursed with being Eileen”. I found this very apposite in two ways – first of all it’s a perfect example of Naoise Dolan’s ability to penetrate to the heart of our human pretentions; secondly as what was I think stronger in this book than “Eileen” was how other characters hold up a mirror to Ava and what she believes about her sense of self-worth.
In terms of Caolinn Hughes – with a central character from Ireland with left-wing millennial views, closely involved with a representative of the banks she blames for much of her home country’s current malaise and her own lack of prospects of home ownership, we can see some overlap between Eva and Gael. But Eva is a more subtle character than Gael – happy to form a (literal) accommodation with what she professes to hate. And the politics is also more nuanced. The Blairate (although we suspect he may vote Tory) Julian is (at one time) described by his left wing academic father Miles, as a “centrist son”, but still when asked by Ava “How can you agree with me so much and not like Corbyn” shoots back “I really think the difference stems from our feeling on whether it would be in the national interest to turn Britain into a gulag”. It is hard to imagine Hughes having a character saying that.
The other author inevitably drawn into any comparison is Sally Rooney – a young author, a Trinity Graduate, a successful debater, one with strong left-wing political views, writing about millennials and their relationships and about class/privilege differences: the links are clear and made rather more explicit when extracts of this book were first published in Stinging Fly by Rooney. I see some strong differences though in writing style and subject matter (particularly the exploration of dialogue here). Another difference is in the use of technology – Rooney’s characters are surprisingly 20th Century in their communication styles (with texts and almost epistolary emails) – here Instagram is a near constant companion. Where there is another similarity is in the use of a familiar story (for Rooney respectively an affair with an older married man, and how does friendship translate into love; here a classic ménage-a-trois).
But what about what makes the book distinctive. That is clear – it is a razor sharp ability to dissect the hidden meaning of dialogue and to tease out the different layers of spoken and unspoken communication – all of this filtered through gender differences, sexuality, class, colonialism, race. Some of the vignette conversations are masterpieces in this respect.
The book is also particularly strong on language – Eva’s role as a TEFL teacher gives her the ability to examine language and grammar – and the implicit assumptions within grammatically correct English compared to the different life views in the English of her Irish childhood.
The author herself has written widely about her autism – her need to prepare in advance and parse exchanges and conversations, to consider and clarify people’s meanings and motivations (most notably here - https://www.independent.ie/entertainm...) and I believe that this need informs and strengthens her writing.
The first part of the book almost demands a second copy and a highlighted pen (or I guess more easily a Kindle copy) to highlight the many apposite and clever exchanges and observations between Julian and Ava (and their friends and family).
This kind of pace is difficult to sustain – and on one level it’s a relief when Julian departs for London, and Ava engages with Edith. After a period though, as Ava and Edith fall into (judged by Ava’s standards) an almost normal relationship, the book starts to lose focus and it’s not a moment too late for us (even though a nightmare for Ava) when Julian reappears, as do the clever observations.
Overall a memorable and very promising debut....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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