Harriet Devine's Blog

The Body Lies by Jo Baker

Back in 2013 I read and hugely enjoyed Jo Baker's Longbourn, which retold the story of Pride and Prejudice  from the point of view of the servants. I hadn't spotted anything else by Baker since then, though I'm now rather tempted by the sound of her A Country Road, A Tree, about Samuel Beckett in wartime France. But as soon as I saw this one I knew I had to read it and have just finished. It is indeed a superb novel.

When we first meet the narrator, whose name we never discover, she is a young married woman, several months pregnant, living in south-east London and working in a bookshop while spending her spare time writing a novel. The story begins dramatically as, on the way home from work, she is randomly attacked by a man in the street. She manages to make her escape but is extremely traumatised by the event, and her husband Matt's advice to 'put it behind you' is no help. 

Fast forward three years and she is now a published author with a three year old son, Sam. The London flat is small and cramped, and she decides to apply for a job teaching creative writing in a university in the north west of England. Rather to her surprise she gets the job, but Matt decides he doesn't want to move. So as the new term begins she and Sam are living in a remote cottage, a bus ride away from campus and with no phone or mobile signal. Not surprisingly this will ring alarm bells for readers, but at first mother and child are happy enough with their life in the cottage, making do with Matt's brief weekend visits. At the university, however, things are far from easy. There are supposed to be three people in the creative writing department, but one of them is on extended sick leave and another is on an exchange at a Canadian university. So, completely new to teaching, she finds herself in charge not just of the MA course but also the undergraduate degree, plus all kinds of admin which is increasingly piled onto her by her unsympathetic head of department. 

Exhausted and overworked, she struggles with the small cohort of MA students. Among them there's the local solicitor, who is writing a generic crime novel replete with dead female bodies, the American girl whose work is all about werewolves, and most notably there is Nicholas, a young man whose wealthy parents live in the neighbourhood. Nicholas is scathing about the solicitor's work ('Does it have to start with a dead woman? I don’t know this woman. She could be anybody. Literally. Any. Body. She has no agency, she’s not a character, she’s a device. She’s not real, so we don’t care'), and, though his own writing also contains the dead body of a young woman, he insists that everything he writes is the absolute truth. He dominates the class and clearly is developing an obsession with the narrator, who struggles to keep things on an even keel, even as his later writings become focussed on herself. Then a dramatic event turns everything upside down and the narrator's life becomes increasingly terrifying.

This, then, is essentially a psychological thriller, but it's one that is profoundly self-questioning. Alarming and threatening though the narrator's experiences become, it's equally alarming to witness how easily such situations can be misread by outsiders. The novel questions the role of creative writing and in particular its focus on the female body, and we are treated from time to time to extracts from the students' writing so we can make up our own minds about its value and accuracy. It's also a brilliantly satirical campus novel, which is painfully funny and desperately accurate about life in a small northern university, as I know to my cost having spent many years teaching in one such myself. I loved every minute of this novel and was really sorry when it came to an end. Our Shiny New Books reviewer Gill Davies loved it too - you can read her review here.

Girl Writing

This is 'The Letter' painted in 1893 by the American Impressionist artist Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933).  

Woman Reading

This is A Pleasant Corner by the English artist John Calcott Horsley (1817-1903). He apparently designed the first ever Christmas card.

Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman

I've read several of Laura Lippman's many novels, the most recent being the wonderful Sunburn, which I reviewed here last year.  Lippman is possibly best known as the author of a series of police procedurals featuring Tess Monaghan, a journalist turned P.I., but it is her standalone novels which have grabbed me the most and this one, set in the 1960s, is no exception. The protagonist here is another journalist or rather, at the start, a would-be journalist. This is Maddie Swartz, who, as the novel begins, has recently separated from her husband and has never worked at all. Her life has up to now been that of a conventional middle-class Jewish housewife. Now she decides all this must change, and she manages to get her foot into the door of the Star newspaper, initially in an admin job. However she is anxious to become a proper reporter, and the opportunity arise when she and a friend discover the dead body of a young woman named Tessie Fine. Excited at having such a crucial role in the mystery, Maddie writes her first piece for the paper, only to find it has to be edited - basically rewritten - by one of the paper's senior reporters.

Soon, however, another chance puts her once again at the heart of a new murder. This time it is that of a young black woman, Cleo Sherwood. Missing for several months, her body is discovered in a fountain in nearby Druid Hill Park, as a result of a phone call made by Maddie. However she is soon to discover that the death of a black girl does not warrant the extensive coverage allotted to her first discovery. Undterred, she sets about investigating Cleo's murder on her own, a task which brings her into unfamiliar territory as she encounters a secretly gay male couple ('the Baltimore Bachelors'), a nightclub owner and a political fixer, and attempts to get information from Cleo's mother and sister.

Although Maddie is the centre of the novel, we hear the voices of a number of different characters as well, including that of Cleo herself. Maddie is a great character, strong and determined if at times rather blind to the way her enquiries are smashing their way into hitherto innocent lives. In fact she has a secret of her own - she has taken a lover, a black policeman who visits her at night, arriving in an illegally borrowed police car as black officers are not issued with vehicles. It's a satisfyingly intense relationship but Maddie underestimates the powerful feelings that are stirred up and things do not end well. This strand of the plot is just one of the many elements of period detail which provoke thought about how much has changed since the mid-60s and how much has remained the same. The novel is published today and I recommend it highly.

 

 

 

Girl With Book

This was painted in 1901 by the French artist William-Alphonse Bouguereau (1825-1905). He was extremely successful in his day, though came to seem too slick and old-fashioned when tastes changed with the rise of Impressionsm.

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

Why have I never read Michael Ondaatje before? I kind of thought I had, but in fact my only knowledge of his work was the movie adaptation of his 1992 Booker prizewinning novel The English Patient, which I've probably seen twice. I had vaguely taken on board the fact that Warlight was long listed for the Booker last year, but I'm not an avid devourer of long or short lists, and somehow the title didn't particularly grab me. All that changed a week or two ago when I read a review of the novel on Ali's blog. I've been in a curious state of not really knowing what to read, and on the strength of the review I made my way straight to Amazon where I read the first pages of the novel on that very useful tool they call  'Look Inside' and bought it immediately. And how glad I am that I got it as it has given me many hours of intense pleasure.

Warlight is narrated by Nathaniel, who is fourteen years old when the story begins, not long after the end of WW2. He and his older sister Rachel have been living a fairly uneventful life with their parents in a large house in Putney. One day his father announces that he has to move to Singapore to run an office there. Rose, the children's mother, will join him there soon afterwards. The two teenagers are put in the care of their mysterious lodger, whose name is Walter but is always referred to as The Moth. The children think at first that he is a criminal but that gets revised after a while. It's been arranged that the children will attend boarding schools but that doesn't last very long - they both run away and manage to persuade the Moth that they can start going back to day school again. Their supposed guardian doesn't keep a tight control on them, and they tend to wander the streets a lot, eating street food from stalls. There's a lot of uncertainty in their lives, amplified considerably when they discover that their mother's carefully packed trunk, supposedly sent to Singapore, is actually stored away in the basement of the house.

Rachel and Nathaniel have always been close, but as time goes on they begin to lead very separate lives. Nathaniel doesn't actually know what Rachel does with her time, though she appears to be attending school. He, on the other hand, is missing school a great deal. Instead he has started hanging out with an associate of the Moth's, a retired boxing champion known as the Pimlico Darter. The Darter has a business of sorts, though he never gives a name to it - initially it consists of moving illicitly imported greyhounds across London in a mussel boat through a series of little used canals, and delivering them to mysterious men who will dispose of them elsewhere. Later the dogs are replaced by large numbers of cardboard boxes, the contents of which are unknown, but are probably some form of munitions. Nathaniel starts accompanying the Darter on his trips, but he also has a job as a washer-up in the Criterion Hotel kitchens. It is here that he encounters a teenage waitress, known to him only by a pseudonym, Agnes Street, so called after the location of the first empty house where the two meet for passionate sexual encounters - there are a series of these houses, to which Agnes gets the keys from her brother, an estate agent. He and Agnes become close - he meets her parents, a quiet couple in a council flat, and introduces her to the Darter, who she initially believes to be his father. Other lodgers and visitors come and go in the house - Nathaniel particularly likes a young woman called Olive Lawrence, who is an ethnographer and briefly the Darter's girlfriend. Then there's a tall young man named Arthur whose role is never defined, but who visits the house regularly every few days. Nathaniel wonders where his mother is, and one evening in a Bromley nightclub with Agnes is almost sure that he spots her briefly in the crowd. So life continues in an intense but almost dreamlike fashion until suddenly everything changes - there is an attempted kidnapping, people are injured or killed, and Rose finally reappears to announce that she and Nathaniel are moving to a cottage in Suffolk.

So ends the first part of the novel. The second part moves forward twelve years - Nathaniel is now twenty eight and has been recruited by the intelligence services for a rather lowly job sifting information for either publication or destruction. It has become clear by now that Rose was working as a spy during and after the war, having been recruited by a childhood friend called Marsh Felon. March is a fascinating character - the youngest son of a local Suffolk thatcher, he fell from a roof aged sixteen and ended up recovering from a broken hip in Rose's parents' house. He becomes close to the eight year old Rose, and their friendship continues through his new life, as he attends Trinity College Cambridge and becomes a regular BBC broadcaster specialising in nature programmes. But his true life is really in Intelligence and he becomes what is known as a Gatherer - one who recruits people - hence his recruitment of Rose. All this and much more is slowly uncovered by Nathaniel, whose job allows him to gain access to secret files on the activities of these people. Indeed the main focus of his life becomes the uncovering of the secret life of his largely unknown mother, who by now has died in somewhat mysterious circumstances. Gradually some enduring mysteries do get solved, but Nathaniel will never know the answers to everything he is seeking.

This has been a most glorious read, fascinating and totally immersive. It plays with the concept of memory and the fact that we can never truly understand the truth of the lives of even those who are closest to us. I've already got another of Ondaatje's novels to read on my iPad and look forward to more happy weeks in his company. So many thanks to Ali for the tip off!

Girl Reading

This lovely portrait is by the celebrated French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875). Though he is probably best known for his beautiful landscapes, which inspired the Impressionists, he also painted a great many figures, mostly posed in his studio though he set them in natural landscapes.