There are some books that leap up and grab you by the throat straight away, and others that creep up on you slowly but end up taking just as firm a grip. Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand That First Held Mine came into the second category, at least for me.I was certainly disposed to like it, and I was intrigued by the double narrative form -- two women, two stories, with a fifty year gap between them -- but it took a little while for me to get completely sucked in. My goodness, though, once I did I literally could not put it down, and actually finished it at 2 am, not a time of day I am usually to be found with the light on.
So why did I like this novel so much? For many reasons. Of course the usual one applies -- I got caught up in the characters and their lives and wanted to know how they would develop. Also there is a mystery at the heart of the novel, and you may know that I really love a mystery. Above all, though, I was drawn in by the twin stories, so far apart in time but clearly linked in some way, though even when the realisation dawns that there is going to be a link it is not at all apparent what it will be, and I guessed wrongly a couple of times. I also loved the evocation of London, my home town and somewhere I know very well. In the story of Lexie, who leaves a dull home in Devon for a "technicolour" life in London, the Soho of the 1950s, inhabited by intellectuals and artists who frequent after-hours drinking clubs and run struggling small magazines is made extraordinarily vivid. In the contemporary strand of the story Elina, an artist, has come to London from Finland. Her part of the narrative is set in north London, close to Hampstead Heath, and she pushes her tiny new-born baby around streets I could almost see for myself. And, although the stories are set so far apart in time, there are reminders from time to time of the way the locations of the 50s have been transmuted in contemporary London.
This is a novel about motherhood, with all its pleasures and its agonies -- the intensity of feeling that links a mother with her new-born child is amazingly well evoked. It's also a novel about love, and about memory, how it can be suppressed and how it can be reawakened. It is a serious and thought-provoking novel, and sometimes very sad, so much so that at one point it made me cry. But, at the very end, there is optimism and the promise of happiness and of resolution of old pains and old scores.
If you would like to see an excellent short video of Maggie O'Farrell talking about The Hand That First Held Mine, which beautifully evokes the Soho of the 1950s in lovely black and white images, you can do so here!
