Imagine my surprise when I realised the hard-to-believe premise of Deceptions, by Rebecca Frayn, is based on a true story. If your son disappeared at the age of 12 and returned a few years later, would you be able to recognise him with certainty? Would you know if the returning prodigal was an impostor, and if so would you pretend not to notice?
It really doesn’t matter whether this is credible or not, or that we can ruin part of the plot by reading about the story that inspired Deceptions in the back of the book. The character who fascinates the reader isn’t Dan, the 12-year-old who vanishes without a trace, or his widowed mother Annie, whose obsessive search is completely understandable. Our attention is all on Julian, the man who had moved in with Annie and had just asked her to marry him when Dan set off on his bike to school one morning and didn’t come home again.
Frayn has taken a real risk with Julian, and so has the publisher. Not so long ago aspiring novelists were told main characters had to be likeable, and Julian certainly isn’t able to get our sympathy at any level. Annie wants to be totally politically correct, with her left-wing views, her relaxed attitude to parenting, and her determination to live in a poor area and send her children to the local failing comprehensive.
Julian is an art specialist and valuer, pulling on his hygienic white gloves to study and evaluate fakes and masterpieces in the art world. The comprehensive school is disturbing to him, with the sound of lower class accents and children of diverse nationalities. There’s an undertone of racism and snobbery running through his first person narrative.
We don’t feel we can believe what he says because he’s so unsympathetic to us. As his dislike of Dan becomes more apparent, together with his resentment of Annie’s continuing love for her son, we do wonder if he knows more about this disappearance than he’s telling us. Annie’s daughter is quite different, seen as delightful and intelligent by him, and he likes to take her for long walks. We don’t quite trust him alone with her either.
The character of Julian is so well drawn that we can’t tell if he’s the good man he makes himself out to be, devoted to Annie and her daughter and just repressed and lacking in social skills, or if his dislike of Dan’s lack of intelligence and poor grammar is part of a dangerously abusive hidden side. Even Dan had started to be embarrassed by his mother’s Guardian on the table and had stopped bringing friends home, so it’s up to the reader to decide exactly what’s going on and who to like, if anyone.
Before Dan’s disappearance, Annie and Julian liked to joke about their different personalities, enjoying the roles of ‘right-on parent’ and ‘old fogey’. After Dan goes, their personalities force them apart, as Annie sees her engagement to Julian as the reason he ran away – if he ran away. From his lonely new bachelor flat at a distance, Julian sees the shabby residential area as a kind of utopia he wants to return to.
It’s a pity the book blurb informs us that Dan is going to turn up again as this could work well as a surprise. But is it really Dan? Can we trust Julian who has lost all respect in the art world by calling a genuine painting a fake and losing a client a small fortune? Would he not want Dan to return and convince himself any pretender to his place with Annie was an impostor? He certainly kept hoping she would forget Dan, and this insistence ruined their relationship. Or would Annie be the one to delude herself?
There are all sorts of questions in this book that keep us reading on, not least the difficult problem of how we can fit a new relationship into an established one parent home.
Showing posts with label Simon and Schuster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Simon and Schuster. Show all posts
Tuesday, 14 December 2010
Saturday, 11 December 2010
A Pageturning Novel About Alzheimers?
Pageturner, alzheimers and novel aren’t three words you’d normally expect to see in the same sentence, and yet they go together to describe Still Alice, the debut from Simon & Schuster by Lisa Genova. When I saw the blurb I was a bit reluctant to start reading, thinking the subject would be depressing and stressful. How wrong I was.
Still Alice is a remarkable novel that will change the way you view alzheimers and the way you respond to people with this condition. It will change the way you think about alzheimers if you are ever diagnosed with it, and will certainly influence the way you relate to people close to you if they become affected. If you are already living with alzheimers, as a patient or as a friend, relative or professional, Still Alice is a novel you should take a look at.
Genova puts us right inside the experience of alzheimers by telling this story through the first person narrative of Alice, a university professor who is just 50 when she gets her diagnosis. She knows exactly what this will mean because, like Genova, she is a neuroscience specialist. The novel opens with Alice at her most capable intellectually – known in academic circles for her amazing ability to remember the detailed facts of her subject, including where precisely to find the quotes to reference research papers.
Alice relaxes by jogging round her town, knowing the map of the area and loving her independence. Admired by her colleagues and loved by her husband and daughters, she’s the type of career woman and successful family organiser many would aspire to emulate. Like us, she puts the first signs of memory loss down to trying to do too many things at once, but the diagnosis comes quite early in the novel. After that, due to her professional expertise, she knows how to recognise and chart her own progress into alzheimers and how she feels she should prepare for what is to come.
This knowledge also lets her find strategies to cope with each stage and to plan for what she wants to do when it goes too far. She knows she won’t be able to remember how or why she will want to end it all at a certain stage, so she leaves instructions for herself that she hopes she will follow regardless. Her Blackberry soon becomes her way of giving herself a To Do list to follow, as memory fails, and it has one important instruction of how to find the means of suicide on the day she can’t remember the answer to a few simple questions.
Once she no longer remembers simple information about her family she feels it will be time to use some items she has prepared to kill herself. Many of us would feel we would want to do the same. But as the story progresses, as we really feel what it is like to be Alice, will we still want her to commit suicide at that key moment or will we see alzheimers in a different way? Will Alice manage to go through with her initial plan right to the end?
I won’t spoil Still Alice by giving you the answers to this. All I can say is that suicide won’t be a plan I’ll be making if I ever get this diagnosis, and I’ll remember Alice if ever those close to me are affected by alzheimers. I will never see this condition in the same way again, and that’s a remarkable achievement by a novelist writing about such an important subject. On a purely stylistic level, Genova never swerves from her course of only seeing this through Alice’s eyes, and once we start this experience with her we can’t stop reading until we see it through.
Still Alice is a remarkable novel that will change the way you view alzheimers and the way you respond to people with this condition. It will change the way you think about alzheimers if you are ever diagnosed with it, and will certainly influence the way you relate to people close to you if they become affected. If you are already living with alzheimers, as a patient or as a friend, relative or professional, Still Alice is a novel you should take a look at.
Genova puts us right inside the experience of alzheimers by telling this story through the first person narrative of Alice, a university professor who is just 50 when she gets her diagnosis. She knows exactly what this will mean because, like Genova, she is a neuroscience specialist. The novel opens with Alice at her most capable intellectually – known in academic circles for her amazing ability to remember the detailed facts of her subject, including where precisely to find the quotes to reference research papers.
Alice relaxes by jogging round her town, knowing the map of the area and loving her independence. Admired by her colleagues and loved by her husband and daughters, she’s the type of career woman and successful family organiser many would aspire to emulate. Like us, she puts the first signs of memory loss down to trying to do too many things at once, but the diagnosis comes quite early in the novel. After that, due to her professional expertise, she knows how to recognise and chart her own progress into alzheimers and how she feels she should prepare for what is to come.
This knowledge also lets her find strategies to cope with each stage and to plan for what she wants to do when it goes too far. She knows she won’t be able to remember how or why she will want to end it all at a certain stage, so she leaves instructions for herself that she hopes she will follow regardless. Her Blackberry soon becomes her way of giving herself a To Do list to follow, as memory fails, and it has one important instruction of how to find the means of suicide on the day she can’t remember the answer to a few simple questions.
Once she no longer remembers simple information about her family she feels it will be time to use some items she has prepared to kill herself. Many of us would feel we would want to do the same. But as the story progresses, as we really feel what it is like to be Alice, will we still want her to commit suicide at that key moment or will we see alzheimers in a different way? Will Alice manage to go through with her initial plan right to the end?
I won’t spoil Still Alice by giving you the answers to this. All I can say is that suicide won’t be a plan I’ll be making if I ever get this diagnosis, and I’ll remember Alice if ever those close to me are affected by alzheimers. I will never see this condition in the same way again, and that’s a remarkable achievement by a novelist writing about such an important subject. On a purely stylistic level, Genova never swerves from her course of only seeing this through Alice’s eyes, and once we start this experience with her we can’t stop reading until we see it through.
Tuesday, 27 April 2010
Monique Roffey: A White Woman, A Green Bicycle, and the Orange Prize
It came as no surprise to me to hear Monique Roffey had been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for her novel The White Woman on the Green Bicycle. As soon as I received it for review I knew I was in for a treat and I wasn’t disappointed. Roffey is surely one of the best women novelists around and this tale of Trinidad is as irresistible as her earlier work.
Her first novel, Sun Dog, tempted me to buy it after reading an excerpt. It’s not easy for a debut novelist to have this effect, but there was something about her fragile anti-hero as he discovered his body was changing with the seasons, sprouting buds between fingers and toes in Spring. I just had to read more and find out about this shy young man working in a delicatessen and rebelling against the commune upbringing he’d had with his hippy mother.
The White Woman on a Green Bicycle tempts the reader just as Sun Dog did. The lush landscape of Trinidad makes us feel we’re right there, or want to be there. In fact the green hills of Trinidad come so vividly to life that they actually speak to the characters and seduce them or inspire their envy.
It might be hard to imagine why one of the main characters, Sabine, doesn’t want to live there and craves the London suburban home her husband promised her if she would spend a bit of time in Trinidad while he establishes himself in his job. But, from the first days, Sabine is sensitive to the feeling that Trinidad doesn’t want her, doesn’t want the white people still living like the colonialists of the past. She’s both attracted to Trinidad and its people, and also pushed out due to her compassion and awareness. She agrees with the Trinidadians but she isn’t one of them so can’t rebel alongside them.
Her husband George is different. Like the other men sent there by businesses he can be important in Trinidad, can have a decent job, buy land and build his big house, and move on from the strong love he feels for his wife at the start through a series of affairs as the decades become more permissive. Gradually Sabine realises he will never keep his promise to take her home – this is his home. Her children are Creole and love the island, and she’s the only disappointed one: the one who doesn’t ever feel she fits in.
Roffey’s expertise is in telling this story from the point of view of both characters, Sabine and George, and keeping the reader’s empathy for both of them. In fact, we can tell that their love for each other has somehow survived. At the start of the book they’re both old and resigned to what their life has been, having given up on what they had hoped for, so I’ve given away none of the plot.
Instead of making the reader wait to see what happens we start at the end of their lives and the book lets us see back into various details. The first half of the novel is from George’s perspective, as an old man, wanting somehow to redeem himself in his wife’s eyes. The second half is told by the young Sabine from the time of her arrival on the island through the first decades of their marriage.
I particularly enjoy a book that tells me about the history of a country that I hadn’t known about, and Roffey does this in a masterful way. Not long after Sabine and George arrive the Trinidadians are roused to support the charismatic leader Eric Williams who promises to free them from the remnants of colonialism. Sabine is metaphorically seduced by him, empathising with the people, and is emotionally and physically aroused by the atmosphere he creates. I’ll say no more, and leave you to discover how Roffey weaves politics, landscape, the personal and the public figures so that the bigger picture and the smaller picture somehow work together.
If I have a criticism it’s that at times Roffey’s style can follow the day-to-day in such a realistic way that it’s possible to leave the book down and pick it up again weeks later. This happens in some chapters during the first half where we see George’s view of the marriage and Trinidad. Having said that, even his account is interspersed with vivid scenes including the beating of a black teenager by the local police that had me on the edge of my seat.
Once the story moves to Sabine’s perspective I couldn’t get enough of it. There’s always a risk when a novelist tells a story through two different viewpoints that the reader will prefer one to the other. Roffey has imagined life through the experience of both George and Sabine so well that it still feels like a major achievement, and no doubt many male readers will empathise more with George.
Compassion is a quality I look for in a novelist and Roffey certainly has it. She has written so that we can understand the history of Trinidad and this particular marriage, and she has done it without allocating blame so that we understand the reasons for the failures of individuals and even Eric Williams. The characters come to life in our minds and we remember them as if we knew them, and it’s as if we’ve been to Trinidad or want to go. It’s a novel that will stay in the mind like a memory of a real experience, and I highly recommend it.
Her first novel, Sun Dog, tempted me to buy it after reading an excerpt. It’s not easy for a debut novelist to have this effect, but there was something about her fragile anti-hero as he discovered his body was changing with the seasons, sprouting buds between fingers and toes in Spring. I just had to read more and find out about this shy young man working in a delicatessen and rebelling against the commune upbringing he’d had with his hippy mother.
The White Woman on a Green Bicycle tempts the reader just as Sun Dog did. The lush landscape of Trinidad makes us feel we’re right there, or want to be there. In fact the green hills of Trinidad come so vividly to life that they actually speak to the characters and seduce them or inspire their envy.
It might be hard to imagine why one of the main characters, Sabine, doesn’t want to live there and craves the London suburban home her husband promised her if she would spend a bit of time in Trinidad while he establishes himself in his job. But, from the first days, Sabine is sensitive to the feeling that Trinidad doesn’t want her, doesn’t want the white people still living like the colonialists of the past. She’s both attracted to Trinidad and its people, and also pushed out due to her compassion and awareness. She agrees with the Trinidadians but she isn’t one of them so can’t rebel alongside them.
Her husband George is different. Like the other men sent there by businesses he can be important in Trinidad, can have a decent job, buy land and build his big house, and move on from the strong love he feels for his wife at the start through a series of affairs as the decades become more permissive. Gradually Sabine realises he will never keep his promise to take her home – this is his home. Her children are Creole and love the island, and she’s the only disappointed one: the one who doesn’t ever feel she fits in.
Roffey’s expertise is in telling this story from the point of view of both characters, Sabine and George, and keeping the reader’s empathy for both of them. In fact, we can tell that their love for each other has somehow survived. At the start of the book they’re both old and resigned to what their life has been, having given up on what they had hoped for, so I’ve given away none of the plot.
Instead of making the reader wait to see what happens we start at the end of their lives and the book lets us see back into various details. The first half of the novel is from George’s perspective, as an old man, wanting somehow to redeem himself in his wife’s eyes. The second half is told by the young Sabine from the time of her arrival on the island through the first decades of their marriage.
I particularly enjoy a book that tells me about the history of a country that I hadn’t known about, and Roffey does this in a masterful way. Not long after Sabine and George arrive the Trinidadians are roused to support the charismatic leader Eric Williams who promises to free them from the remnants of colonialism. Sabine is metaphorically seduced by him, empathising with the people, and is emotionally and physically aroused by the atmosphere he creates. I’ll say no more, and leave you to discover how Roffey weaves politics, landscape, the personal and the public figures so that the bigger picture and the smaller picture somehow work together.
If I have a criticism it’s that at times Roffey’s style can follow the day-to-day in such a realistic way that it’s possible to leave the book down and pick it up again weeks later. This happens in some chapters during the first half where we see George’s view of the marriage and Trinidad. Having said that, even his account is interspersed with vivid scenes including the beating of a black teenager by the local police that had me on the edge of my seat.
Once the story moves to Sabine’s perspective I couldn’t get enough of it. There’s always a risk when a novelist tells a story through two different viewpoints that the reader will prefer one to the other. Roffey has imagined life through the experience of both George and Sabine so well that it still feels like a major achievement, and no doubt many male readers will empathise more with George.
Compassion is a quality I look for in a novelist and Roffey certainly has it. She has written so that we can understand the history of Trinidad and this particular marriage, and she has done it without allocating blame so that we understand the reasons for the failures of individuals and even Eric Williams. The characters come to life in our minds and we remember them as if we knew them, and it’s as if we’ve been to Trinidad or want to go. It’s a novel that will stay in the mind like a memory of a real experience, and I highly recommend it.
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