Having sat on my wish list, after a review in Planet, for
some time I read this book on the plane out to Canada back in May. Your encounter with a novel is always, I
think, more intense when you get the opportunity to spend 9 straight hours
reading it.
This is a bitter sweet story, based are a kind of “who do
you think you are?” journey. It is full
of all the richness that was so sadly lacking in Barry Unsworth’s Lands of
Marvels, while both centre on the lives of a group of “white” British within a
hinterland of an indigenous population, that unease about the characterisation
that plagued Land
of Marvels is thankfully
absence here. Perhaps it is because the
key dynamic of this story is the class tensions between the “white” characters,
it is a tale of the birth pangs of the social and sexual revolution that would
come in the following decade (the 1960s).
It is also a tale, fundamentally, of lives lived in
regret. Freedom was momentarily grasped
and then through tragedy (in the dramatic sense) revoked. The lead character
Nia discovers that the small and sheltered life of her Mother was the
consequence of that tragedy, and perhaps the only route to survival after it.
This is one of those tales that is haunting, and it lingers
(in the best possible way), despite being a fiction the pain is so vivid that
it demands your continuing attention.
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