Well! I started out really disliking this book and ended up really loving it. That's not something that happens very often - in fact I can't remember a book I've actually gone on reading when I didn't take to it. In fact, I was listening to it on Audible, and I made use of their returns policy to give it back when I was about a quarter way through, but either I didn't click the right button or they messed up, as it remained in my library. So, having failed to find anything else I fancied listening to, I decided to press on regardless. And I'm so glad I did.
If you pay any attention at all to book news, you'll know that this is Gail Honeyman's debut novel. She entered the first chapters for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, didn't win but got an agent, and the book ended up in a fierce eight-way publishing auction. Although it appeared less than two months ago, a movie is already in development, starring Reese Witherspoon (is this a good idea? Hope so).
So, what's it all about? Eleanor, who narrates the novel herself, is a 30-year-old single woman who works in the same Glasgow office where she started her first job nine years ago. She's highly intelligent and well-educated, but utterly alone in the world. Her colleagues think she's an oddball, and she has no friends outside work. Her weeks are all the same: a simple meal and the Archers in the evening, and at the weekend two bottles of vodka, which she spaces out over the two days 'so I'm neither drunk nor sober'. The only contact she has outside work is a weekly telephone conversation with 'Mummy', a violently unpleasant woman who is clearly incarcerated somewhere though we never discover where, and whose main purpose is to destroy any confidence or self-esteem her daughter may have managed to develop during the week.
Eleanor never tells us about her past, but as time goes on we are able to discern that it has been one of extreme abuse and deprivation. For one thing, her face is scarred and we know it's the result of a fire in childhood. We learn that from the age of ten she has been raised in foster homes, and that in her twenties she was for two years in a terrifyingly abusive relationship. As a result of all this she has never learned any social skills, has no idea how to interact with people, and often offends others by speaking her mind. Many readers have found Eleanor's social awkwardness, and the crush she develops on a rock star, to be funny, but my problem was that it all seemed too painful to be amusing. Painful, and almost too extreme to be credible, which is basically what put me off in the first instance.
However, when I got back into it, things took a turn for the better. Eleanor had already encountered Raymond, a young bloke from the IT department who fixed her computer. She didn't think much of him at first - he seemed scruffy and altogether rather a mess. But a chance incident in the street which causes the two of them of work together to help an old man who's had an attack brings them slowly closer, and eventually a genuine friendship develops, with weekly lunches and joint visits to social events. Finally, when Eleanor reaches a dramatic crisis which almost costs her her life, Raymond is there to save her and persuade her to try counselling, which enables her finally to face and deal with the demons from her past.
So ultimately this is a feel-good novel, tender and heartwarming. Central to the whole thing is how the friendship between Eleanor and Raymond develops - I was rather relieved to find that it didn't burst into a full-blown romance - it's so much more satisfying to witness the slow, steady growth of trust and respect. Raymond is, after all, the first person who has really been able to see the goodness at the heart of this strange, spiky, difficult woman, and who perseveres even when she doesn't seem to appreciate him in return. But of course that changes too over time, and she's able to see beyond the things that irritate her - his bad taste in clothes, his habit of talking with his mouth full - and all this draws her out of the bubble she's built around herself and makes her into an altogether more normal and approachable woman. Whether things will develop further between them is not beyond the realms of possibility, but we are left with a warm feeling of hope, knowing that whatever happens they will remain the best of friends.
So I came to mock and stayed to pray, as the saying goes. There is a twist at the end which I wasn't terribly happy with or convinced by, but I'm willing to let that go for the sake of the extreme pleasure I got from this charming novel. The Audible recording is very well read by Cathleen McCarron and I'm grateful to them for the download, and for messing up my attempt to return the book. Highly recommended.