If your tastes in books runs to family relationships and domestic drama, to the understated and the quietly poignant, this is an example of an excellent read. It is not an explosive kind of novel, everything happens very quietly, beneath the surface, with a small cast of characters feeling and thinking a lot, but not saying a lot to each other; in a very British way, seldom saying what they really mean or discussing the feelings most important to them.
The protagonist is Marion, a former nurse, married to Michael Deacon, living with their 2 children, Sarah (14) and Eddie (7). They live their quiet, middle-class life, bringing up the children, Michael going to work, Marion the homemaker. Marion however has a secret life. We start the book in the present, with Marion sitting at Michael’s bedside, waiting for his death. The narrative is told in flashbacks by many voices, Marion’s of course, Sarah’s (through her diary and her own voice), even Michael’s. It is a pleasant surprise that the chapters are not titled by whoever the first-person narrator happens to be. The writing is so strong and clear that there can be no mistake as to whom the first-person narrator is in each chapter, even though we are not explicitly told. This is symptomatic of the novel which is full of showing and not telling. It is a mark of the skill of the writing that the reader never gets lost.
Ellis’ protagonist is not a particularly nice woman. Marion comes across as rather self-absorbed, not a good wife or mother. She does loves her children but rather remotely, and for most part, undemonstratively. She doesn’t seem to connect well with her husband; even sitting at his death bed,
I flick through the pages, trying to find a story I could discuss with Michael. Something simple and uninvolving. It’s as if he is a tourist I need to entertain by we don’t share a common language.
p221
She has powerful passions and strong emotions, but seems to have no strong attachment to anyone, family or friend.
There must have been grief, but I could only remember the practicalities of their death. […] My father had finally given up on life a few years after that […] But even his death had been muted, like a sound from another room. I’d felt relieved rather than bereaved. He’d been a constant irritation in his premature old age, like a floating speck in the corner of my eye.
p193
Ellis’ writing is full of lovely, unexpected images like this one, so telling and so original that the writing style alone would have sufficed to hold the reader’s continued attention, even without the plotline.
Not that the plotline is without interest. We rapidly learn that the glamorous father of one of Sarah’s school friends appears on the scene and shows interest in both mother and daughter, blatantly, simultaneously. He flirts with both, and both are rather smitten. And both see each other as rivals. Marion refuses to take seriously the fact that Sarah can really interest Adrian, choosing to believe it is her teenage daughter’s vanity and misinterpretation, because it suits Marion to think Adrian only wants herself. She is a woman who yearns, even needs, to be desired. Later, much much later, Marion is able to be more honest with herself:
I reach back over the years to that street, to where Adrian and I are walking together, him half drunk with wine and me full of wanting him. Look at me then, as full of purpose as a novitiate nun, with only one idea in my head: to be standing between this man and any other woman. Obscuring his view. Keeping my own daughter out of his sight. I note that I wore selfishness next to my skin and a matching coat of unkindness.
p221
The writing is both direct and luminous, the imagery vivid, and the memory juxtaposed in other chapters to different interpretations of the same event, over time.
Despite her youth and adolescent hormones, Sarah sees the situation rather more clearly, and is desperate for her mother to reject Adrian, but does not know how to tell her mother this, while also being flattered by Adrian’s attention, and in no small part because Sarah admires Adrian’s daughter, the equally glamorous Bobbie, whom Sarah ardently wants to be friends with. Into this tangle, we have nosy neighbours, conniving and commenting, the innocent ignorance of a 7-year old boy who suffers his sister’s alternating attention and casual cruelty, and the husband, who knows a lot more than he lets on. The novel builds to a climax when Adrian asks Marion to sneak away for a night, and the consequences of what unfolds thereon.
It is very interesting to have a protagonist who has no particularly strong personal ethics. Marion struggles to stay within the confines of the respectable while not particularly concerned with morals. Ellis illustrates Marion’s mind state beautifully: “I felt as if I was testing the sharp point of regret with the tip of one finger. There was nothing, everything was worn smooth. I had filed all the splinters of my guilt away” (p311). Because there is nothing to hold her back, not shame, not conscience, not guilt, there is a frisson of dread at what she might do, and what may unravel from her actions.
This kind of writing reminds me of some of Anne Tyler’s novels, with its focus on the mundane and everyday, while beneath the mundanity there is trouble formenting. The writing reveals feelings which are terribly raw, which are kept under covers as far as possible, but which are always at risk of being revealed. The characters seem so vulnerable, while the daily happenings can seem so abrasive, casual cruelties so unthinking, an ever-present threat. It is a novel which pulls the reader in right from the start, creating its own bubble and seemingly cut off from the larger world, just as Marion probably feels. It is so well written that on finishing this book, I think I must seek out Ellis’ other and debut novel, The Butcher’s Hook, in the hope it will afford me a similarly excellent reading experience.
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