This is the seventh of the thirteen Man Booker longlisted titles I have read. My thoughts on some of those are blogged here (specifically: Damon Galgut's The Promise, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This). My review of Bewilderment by Richard Powers is forthcoming in The Guardian, and with two of the titles I feel my critical objectivity is too compromised for disinterested reviewing: Nadifa Mohamed's The Fortune Men (since Nadifa is a colleague of mine at RHUL, and an excellent one at that) and Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (Francis is a friend; I read the book in draft, and am even thanked in the acknowledgements. Cool, eh?). That leaves six: A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam, Second Place by Rachel Cusk, The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris, An Island by Karen Jennings, China Room by Sunjeev Sahota and Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead. Should I read some, or all, of these and so satisfy the hobgoblins-of-little-minds completism that plagues my soul? Or should I wait until the shortlist is announced and pick up those that get through to the final stage? Not all of the ones I have read so far will make the final cut, I think. Which brings me to ...
A Town Called Solace. This slight novel is set in a small Canadian town in 1972. If the title is a nod towards Nevil Shute’s 1950 bestseller A Town Like Alice, the point of the allusion is, I suppose, a kind of ironic reversal: Shute’s novel is packed to the gunnels (whatever they are) with melodramatic action: war, death-marches, love, passion, expiration, trauma. Lawson’s novel, on the other hand, is about three varieties of nothing very much, about the road not taken and opportunities missed. If, on the other hand, the title is supposed to remind us of the Jam song, ‘Town Called Malice’, it’s harder to see the applicability. Weller is singing about Thatcherite urban poverty: ‘either cut down on beer or the kid's new gear/It's a big decision in a town called malice’. Lawson’s characters are all comfortably off, and there's nothing urgently punk-new-wave or satirically barbed about the leisurely narrative Lawson devotes to them.
Most of the novel takes places in two Solace houses, next door to one another. In one lives 8-year-old Clara, with her 16-year-old sister Rose and their parents. But Rose runs away after a quarrel with her mother. Clara is agonised with worry at this, and her anxiety is compounded by the fact that there is an intruder in old Mrs Orchard’s house next door. Clara had befriended Mrs Orchard, a childless old woman who had been living alone since the death of her husband some years before. When the old girl went into hospital Clara promised to keep feeding her cat Moses. But now a strange man is visible through the house windows, dragging in big suitcases and moving Mrs Orchard’s things around.
The other two narrative strands are disposed between these two characters. The strange man is Liam Kane, a young-ish guy who has, to his surprise, inherited Mrs Orchard’s house. Recently divorced, Liam was so fed-up with his big-city job as an accountant that he quit. I say ‘big city’. The job was in Toronto, so, you know, big might not be quite the mot juste. Liam’s plan is to renovate the place (it is in a state of some dilapidation), sell it, and move on with his life. He ends up befriending Clara, breaking the news to her that Mrs Orchard is dead, and generally getting drawn-in to the mystery of Rose’s disappearance and small town life.
The third narrative strand is Mrs Orchard’s. Awkwardly, formally speaking, her interleaved chapters are first-person narrations, unlike the third-person other two strands. In them Mrs O describes life in the hospital, or hospice, as she dies, and reminiscences about her life. Childless after many miscarriages, she remembers how strongly, indeed possessively, she felt about toddler Liam Kane decades before, when his parents brought him over from wartime Britain. Liam’s mother, with two other kids and pregnant again with twins, was too exhausted and distracted to give Liam the attention he needed, and Mrs O was only too happy to act in loco parentis. Decades later she and now-grown-up Liam swap occasional letters, but their earlier time together means a lot more to Mrs O than it does to Liam, hence his surprise when he discovered she had left him her house.
It’s a slow, plainly-written, small-focus novel, this; traditional in form and in characterisation, mildly absorbing but not exceptionally so. How it made the Man Booker longlist, leapfrogging thereby a large number of more notable, more interesting and brilliant novels, is one of those perennial Booker mysteries. If it makes the shortlist I’ll eat my hat. My delicious liquorice topper. The peaked cap I own made entirely of yorkshire pudding.
To be clear: I didn’t disenjoy this. It’s fine. It’s a little too leisurely, pacing-wise, and significant parts of it seemed to me not to work so well. Clare’s 8-year-old portion is an attempt to do that Jamesian What Masie Knew thing, and it doesn’t ring true, or it didn’t for me—James’s little girl understands the materialities and statuses of her world but doesn’t quite grasp the interpersonal intensities and perversities of the grown-up relationships around her, where Lawson’s little girl misses inferences any 8-year-old would grasp (Liam has Mrs O’s keys because she gave them him, Mrs O is dead, etc). There’s a great deal of slighty ponderous Clara observation: ‘the [boxes] must have lots of things in them because they were heavy, you could tell by the way the man walked when he carried them in, stooped over, knees bent’ and so on. My sense of the typical 8-year-old is that the most important relationships in their life are their peer-group, school-friends, other kids; but other than her cool older sister (who disappears very early on) Clara’s key relationships here are all with grown-ups: Mrs O, and then when she goes, Liam. She spends very little time interacting with other kids. I guess there are some kids who are like that.
Liam’s characterisation lacks nuance: he’s young and good looking (‘ferociously good looking’ one female character calls him), fundamentally decent but a bit randy and a bit shallow, with a history of failed relationships behind him. The—this is a spoiler, I guess, though you can see this coming a Canadian mile away—solace with which the novel rewards him is the love of a good woman.
There’s more heft to the way Mrs O is characterised, although there’s also a necessary static movelessness to the circumstances out of which she narrates. But the big (actually: small, but that’s OK) reveal, to do with the lengths her childlessness and her love for Liam drove her, once on a time, has actual poignancy and of the three she’s the one who reads most like an actual person. But at root this is a nice, Alice Monroe-esque short story (though I think Monroe would have managed a little more leavening acuity and creative friction in her representation) expanded, like polystyrene, to 300 pages.
The other two narrative strands are disposed between these two characters. The strange man is Liam Kane, a young-ish guy who has, to his surprise, inherited Mrs Orchard’s house. Recently divorced, Liam was so fed-up with his big-city job as an accountant that he quit. I say ‘big city’. The job was in Toronto, so, you know, big might not be quite the mot juste. Liam’s plan is to renovate the place (it is in a state of some dilapidation), sell it, and move on with his life. He ends up befriending Clara, breaking the news to her that Mrs Orchard is dead, and generally getting drawn-in to the mystery of Rose’s disappearance and small town life.
The third narrative strand is Mrs Orchard’s. Awkwardly, formally speaking, her interleaved chapters are first-person narrations, unlike the third-person other two strands. In them Mrs O describes life in the hospital, or hospice, as she dies, and reminiscences about her life. Childless after many miscarriages, she remembers how strongly, indeed possessively, she felt about toddler Liam Kane decades before, when his parents brought him over from wartime Britain. Liam’s mother, with two other kids and pregnant again with twins, was too exhausted and distracted to give Liam the attention he needed, and Mrs O was only too happy to act in loco parentis. Decades later she and now-grown-up Liam swap occasional letters, but their earlier time together means a lot more to Mrs O than it does to Liam, hence his surprise when he discovered she had left him her house.
It’s a slow, plainly-written, small-focus novel, this; traditional in form and in characterisation, mildly absorbing but not exceptionally so. How it made the Man Booker longlist, leapfrogging thereby a large number of more notable, more interesting and brilliant novels, is one of those perennial Booker mysteries. If it makes the shortlist I’ll eat my hat. My delicious liquorice topper. The peaked cap I own made entirely of yorkshire pudding.
To be clear: I didn’t disenjoy this. It’s fine. It’s a little too leisurely, pacing-wise, and significant parts of it seemed to me not to work so well. Clare’s 8-year-old portion is an attempt to do that Jamesian What Masie Knew thing, and it doesn’t ring true, or it didn’t for me—James’s little girl understands the materialities and statuses of her world but doesn’t quite grasp the interpersonal intensities and perversities of the grown-up relationships around her, where Lawson’s little girl misses inferences any 8-year-old would grasp (Liam has Mrs O’s keys because she gave them him, Mrs O is dead, etc). There’s a great deal of slighty ponderous Clara observation: ‘the [boxes] must have lots of things in them because they were heavy, you could tell by the way the man walked when he carried them in, stooped over, knees bent’ and so on. My sense of the typical 8-year-old is that the most important relationships in their life are their peer-group, school-friends, other kids; but other than her cool older sister (who disappears very early on) Clara’s key relationships here are all with grown-ups: Mrs O, and then when she goes, Liam. She spends very little time interacting with other kids. I guess there are some kids who are like that.
Liam’s characterisation lacks nuance: he’s young and good looking (‘ferociously good looking’ one female character calls him), fundamentally decent but a bit randy and a bit shallow, with a history of failed relationships behind him. The—this is a spoiler, I guess, though you can see this coming a Canadian mile away—solace with which the novel rewards him is the love of a good woman.
There’s more heft to the way Mrs O is characterised, although there’s also a necessary static movelessness to the circumstances out of which she narrates. But the big (actually: small, but that’s OK) reveal, to do with the lengths her childlessness and her love for Liam drove her, once on a time, has actual poignancy and of the three she’s the one who reads most like an actual person. But at root this is a nice, Alice Monroe-esque short story (though I think Monroe would have managed a little more leavening acuity and creative friction in her representation) expanded, like polystyrene, to 300 pages.
Thank you for the laughter.
ReplyDelete