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This will include spoilers as it would be too hard to talk about it without giving away some of the key dynamics of the plot…
Jeanie is powerfully written, and it is the affinity with her struggles that give the novel its life. There is a truth in the invisibility of their poverty, for the others in the village the extremes of poverty are beyond their frame of reference and therefore they don’t see the cues that would have told them just how desperate Jeanie has become. There is an authenticity, and a dignity almost, in the careful calculating of how far the small change Jeanie has scraped together will last, and sleeps on cold floor rather than ask the favour of a borrowed bed. Not a fetishising of it, but a speaking of truth. Now that I live a life that in financially secure it can be hard to remember just how much money dominated life when I didn’t have enough – while I was never quite counting the final coins, there were times when there was a lot of juggling needed to make ends meet. And the fear that if you got it wrong things could spiral rapidly out of control.
Somewhere between the end of chapter 32 and start of chapter 33 Jeanie lets her guard down and allow others to help her, this is a key pivot and the final 20 pages could perhaps seem too easy a resolution – but there is the sting of the revelation that Jeanie’s heart condition was a fiction created by Dot. (Revelation or confirmation, as I had a growing sense that there was something not quite right with Jeanie’s condition, it seemed to have an over-played sense of caution around it).
The implications of this do not get fully explored, and after the power of what is given before these questions weigh on me. Dot keeps Jeanie and Julius at home after the death of their father, keeps them in a relationship of children to her mothering, and the lie of the heart condition is central to that. What can seem like a bucolic existence turns sinister as the refusal to engage with the modern world is an instrument of keeping Jeanie confided. Not only this, Dot’s ongoing affair with Rawson gives her a world beyond the home, a stolen space of being that is not on offer to Jeanie. Jeanie on learning the truth seems to set it aside a little too easily for the sake of Julius, who is now dependent on her.
