Review Round-Up

Next week we are going away on holiday, and I seem to have a pile of books I haven’t reviewed. What have I been talking about here lately? Anyway, I must get through them because I’ll forget them otherwise, and I fully intend to spend a good part of my holiday stuck in a book, thus clocking up yet another backlog.

First up, two very different thrillers. River of Darkness by Rennie Airth is set in 1921, under the long shadow of the First World War. It opens with the discovery of a massacre at a manor house in Surrey, the victims all stabbed apart from the lady of the house who has been killed in a strange and disturbing manner. It’s a gruesome crime and a seemingly motiveless one, as the family was highly respectable and much loved in the area. Airth’s novel features Detective Inspector John Madden, a man haunted by the horrors of the trenches who is using his job as a shield against his own despair. For some time the collected police forces, both local and metropolitan are stumped, and Madden and his boss, Chief Inspector Sinclair, know they need results before the case is taken from them and placed in the hands of Chief Superintendent Sampson, a man who puts his own PR before procedure and who they are convinced will take an unimaginative line on the case. But a few breakthroughs put them on the trail of a very damaged man, and their unorthodox use of the new science of psychoanalysis starts to uncover a picture of a criminal who will stop at nothing to satisfy his desires.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It creates a strong sense of place and beautifully reproduces the atmosphere of the early 1920s. It’s also extremely well plotted, inexorably drawing its strings together and then winding them tight as the climax is approached. Yet for all its pace, it’s a spacious book with plenty of time to present and develop characters. John Madden gets himself a love interest in the feisty local doctor, Helen Blackwell, and the emerging portrait of the criminal is so cleverly and delicately done. I loved it; very superior crime fiction.

The second thriller was a most unusual one. Bluethroat Morning by Jacqui Lofthouse is the story of Harry Bliss, a man who cannot get over his wife’s suicide and who, six years later, decides to return to the lonely beach in Norfolk where she took her life to solve the mystery surrounding her death. He’s aided in this by a new love interest, Helen, the 19-year-old daughter of his best friend, a girl who really ought to be out of bounds, but who joins forces with him in part because she’s as obsessed by his wife as he is. The enigmatic center of the novel is Alison Oakley, a once-famous model who left the profession dangerously emaciated. Rebuilding her life, she meets Harry, marries him and writes a bestselling novel about anorexia. So far so good, but faced with the obstacle of the second novel, her self-esteem tumbles again and Harry fears for her state of mind. And then, she comes across an old family photo that shows Harry’s great-grandfather and his second wife, the lovely Arabella who committed suicide by walking into the sea. Alison determines to find out as much as she can about the woman and travels alone to Norfolk to work on her novel, only to end up in, a surprising twist of fate, burning the pages she wrote and re-enacting Arabella’s tragic death.

So as you can begin to see, this is a novel of recurrent patterns, of obsession and of recreating stories from the past. Harry falls in love with Helen because she looks so similar to Arabella, and Helen has read the newspaper reports about Harry that unjustly claimed he caused Alison’s death by neglecting her in her depression and failing to support her in her work. Their edgy relationship, a strange mix of passion and antagonism, propels them on a headlong dash to Norfolk to the cottage where Alison lived and the strange local character, the 98-year-old Ern Higham, who seems to hold all the answers. There’s a great list of secondary characters including a journalist with a grudge against Harry and an American academic seeking to write the biography of Alison’s life. This is a beautifully written novel that moves at a slow, dreamy pace, building up layers of suspense. It makes you wait for the answers, but they are worth it when they come -  it’s a sophisticated, intense read.

Finally, a word about Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones. This novel really does deserve all the accolades it’s been given. What a classy, clever story this is, but you do have to keep your wits about you reading it. It opens with Polly, aged 19, staring at the painting on her wall (of ‘Fire and Hemlock’) and finding a door open in her mind onto a second, hidden set of memories. These take her nine years back in time to a difficult period in her life when her two self-centred parents are divorcing and she is spending most of her time at her grandmother’s house. Playing with her friend, Nina, they gate crash a funeral at the somewhat forbidding manor house at the end of the lane, where Polly is befriended by Thomas Lynne, a man who seems as out of place as she is. Tom, a grown-up, a cellist and possibly the most unlikely but charming hero of fiction, joins Polly in her favourite activity of story-weaving, harmless enough until it seems that the stories they create are coming true. And the more Polly gets to know Tom, the more she realizes that he is bound by curious and worrying ties to the owners of the grand house where they first met, Morton and Laurel Leroy. They seem to have a magical hold over him, and Tom’s safety depends on Polly giving him up as a friend.

This is a covert love story that delights in inserting fantastic elements into recognizable reality. It’s funny and completely engaging and transports the reader effortlessly into a plausible, supernatural world. The ending is complicated, however, and Wynne Jones just loves the art of subtle suggestion. I think I understood about 75% of it, but the effect of this was only to make me want to read the novel over again. It was such a pleasant journey. If you enjoy YA fiction, this is a must, and if you’ve never read any, it’s a great place to start.

Phew! I’ll do some more reviews on Sunday – as you can appreciate, it’s been a great stretch lately.

The Mask of Motherhood

If I ever happen to be in conversation with a woman expecting her first baby, the chances are I’ll say something encouraging. I’ll talk about how much fun children can be, how much they make you laugh, and how, as a mother, you discover depths of strength and patience and compassion that you never thought you had. But I don’t talk about the relentlessness of a child’s demands, the hollow exhaustion you drag from day to day when things are going badly, the feverish anxieties, and that strange self-dislocation that takes place when you realize you’ve not asked yourself what you want for so long that you don’t even know any more. Earlier this week I read a book by Susan Maushart called The Mask of Motherhood, which suggests that by telling only half a story, mothers do a disservice not only to themselves, but also to the community of women at large. The urge to downplay the darker side to being a parent creates a mask of motherhood that can lead many women into making poor decisions for themselves, and governments, employers and fathers into making poor decisions on their behalf.

The problems begin with the unrealistic expectations we take into parenthood, Maushart argues. Being ill-informed about the nature of the task that lies ahead is never good, and particularly not when the task is a life-changing one. Our culture sends us messages about mothering that promise the possibility of effortlessly combining child care with work, leisure and relationships, messages that are pleasant to receive but which make the reality of modern parenting actually much harder to bear. Maushart argues that the hidden truths create all kinds of dissonance, widening the gap between the generations, between people who have children and people who don’t, and also between the import of the verbs ‘to mother’ and ‘to father’. She offers a list of some of the effects of the mask of motherhood, for instance, ‘the values of a culture that glorifies the ideal of motherhood but takes for granted the work of motherhood’, ‘media images of Supermom, complete with briefcase’, ‘the secret worry of the new mother that “I wasn’t cut out for this|”, and the gnawing fear that it shows’, ‘child-care manuals that imply that “easy” babies are made, not born, and that an infant’s digestive tract is somehow linked by fiber-optic cable to its mother’s state of mind’, ‘the tolerance of women for the selective deafness of fathers at 3.00 am, especially in the belief that “a man needs his sleep” so he can “go to work in the morning”. That’s just a few of the highlights, and they show up a pattern of quite ferocious self-denial on the mother’s part, as she denies her right to complaint, to uncertainty and to weakness in the burning desire to be good; a good mother, a credit to society, a pillar of her family.

I found Maushart’s arguments very convincing, not least because my own memories of becoming a mother remain fraught with the blows to my self-esteem that accompanied the traumatic upheaval of giving birth. I was most certainly not expecting what came my way with the baby, most of all the sense that I had somehow lost my life and my sense of self. In retrospect I can see why I felt the transition so keenly. I was always someone who liked to have the feeling of control, which is the first thing to go when you have a newborn. I also gain all my deepest pleasures from solitary pursuits – reading, writing, even just being alone. With a child, these look like the worst forms of selfishness. And I also had high standards for myself when it came to nurture. I was good at looking after people, and would expect a great deal from myself even if dealing with a complete stranger. You can imagine the standards I set when it came to my own child. Maushart suggests that ‘the neediness of the helpless newborn presents a woman with the ultimate test of her fitness to nurture. Even for the “best” most settled baby, the new mother must confront the realities of being on 24-hour-a-day call; of long periods without proper rest; of the physically grueling routines […] In this virtual frenzy of caring, many women have reported feeling as if they have ceased to function, or even exist, in their own right.’ Well you can tick that box for me. And like many women, my response to all this was to stop looking after myself, to think of my own comfort, rest and pleasure as luxuries for which I had no more time or energy.

I was also in a very isolated position. Our families lived a distance away, I’d recently begun a PhD, a lonely occupation at best, and not one that any other woman I knew with a baby was undertaking, and we lived in a village with an ageing demographic. There weren’t other families around. And I’m sure Mister Litlove won’t mind if I mention here that his response to having a baby was to spend a lot of time at work, and to keep the best of himself in storage in the office whenever he was at home. I had full responsibility, zero knowledge and no confidence: my belief was that everything the baby did that was negative was because of me. It didn’t help that my only support at this time was Penelope Leach and her bible of childcare, the only book that has ever terrorized me and which I would have done better to chuck out the window of a fast-moving vehicle. To this day I remember Leach’s calm assurance that within a few weeks a good mother could easily learn to distinguish her babies’ cries, and recognize hunger from thirst or tiredness or distress. Well, this did not help my state of mind one little bit. I was a linguist; even though I knew no Italian, Dutch or Spanish, I could figure them out in simple configurations, from context, similarity to other Latin-based languages, and good guessing. By contrast, I had as much chance of reading my child’s cries as I had of simultaneous translation of Russian or Arabic. I press the old, old bruise and ouch, yes, I still bear a grudge towards Penelope Leach. She was incapable of writing a sentence that did not lower my spirits even further.

And what would have made me feel better? The truth, undoubtedly. Hearing it said, and being able to express it myself. If only I had known other women with babies who were prepared to look me in the eye and say ‘it’s a living nightmare some days, isn’t it?’ To this day I have a horror of people who gloss their condition, who declare how marvelous their lives are. I never understood it (and probably still fail to give it enough credit) as a coping strategy in and of itself, a way to keep one’s head above water. I wouldn’t ever say it for fear that someone like me would be the recipient, someone quietly, silently berating herself for being continuously unequal to the occasion, of failing at this seemingly simplest, most natural of processes. I’m not sure you can ever adequately prepare a woman for the identity crisis that is becoming a mother, but you can encourage her to put the right kind of framework in place. To ensure she has good, dependable help available at all times, to divide up the burden of responsibility fairly with her partner, to strengthen the bonds with friends, particularly those with children as their experience and sympathy can be invaluable, to write down on a piece of paper a list of the things she thinks are basic nurturing necessities in her own life and to refer to it regularly, and NOT to dismiss them as silly indulgences.

I do think it’s extremely important that mothers have the right and the opportunity to express themselves about the negative aspects of their lives, and that the audience does not recoil in horror at witnessing the glorious image of serene motherhood besmirched. Otherwise, cooped up alone with her children, there is always the risk that the negativity will tumble out, unwillingly, unwittingly, onto them. No mother would ever do this if she could avoid it, but everyone has their limits. And once mothers have got things off their chests, they need two books. A copy of Susan Maushart’s The Mask of Motherhood, so they know they are not alone, and a copy of Sarah Napthali’s Buddhism for Mothers, which is by far and away the calmest, most compassionate, most comforting child care book I’ve ever come across, and believe me, I’ve read a few these days. I wish I’d had them both fourteen years ago.