Maria’s War: Amy Witting

“[Teaching] that might have been the best thing in her life. And reading. Escaping from self.”

Amy Witting’s novel, Maria’s War, a story of displacement, acceptance and secrets is set in Leicester Gardens, a Sydney “retirement village,” which is part of a larger complex. There are villas for the better-off and more independent seniors; there’s also a nursing home for the ill, and a hospital block. Retired teacher, Erica Bromley moves into Leicester Gardens after the death of her only friend. Erica, or Brom, as she is known to her former students, does not find the transition to life in Leicester Gardens easy. Erica selected Leicester Gardens mostly due to the “advertised attraction” of bush walks. But she is told by the manager that she cannot walk alone and must be accompanied by another resident. Meals are communal, unless requested otherwise, and the residents have firmly developed relationships, cliques and rules of engagement. Maria, a long term-resident, seems to be Erica’s most promising companion, yet Erica is all too aware that she must not favour Maria’s company too much or she risks the hostility of some of the other, already prickly, residents.

The book is called Maria’s War, and the book opens with Maria being interviewed by Neil, a young man hired by Maria’s family to write her history. Neil has a romantic interest in Maria’s granddaughter, which is not reciprocated, and when Neil works that out, he finds himself becoming impatient with Maria’s story.

So what is Maria’s story? During WWII, Maria, a Lithuanian catholic, was separated from her husband. He was press-ganged into the Wehrmacht while she, displaced with her baby daughter, survived the war after many hardships. Maria recounts some of her history to Neil, and keeps other parts of it secret. Neil senses that he is receiving the expurgated version, and can tell when Maria hits a memory she can’t or won’t discuss. Many of Maria’s actions and decisions were made under harsh circumstance, and now, in the telling, her hardships seem shadowed by the moral implications she must live with. From a distance one can never fully recreate the atmosphere, the pressures, the tensions and the fears that led to one decision over another.

It seems like memory is a live thing, unpredictable. I had not really expected that.

For this reader, the novel excelled at the petty jabs of residents towards each other for perceived grievances or rule-jumpers. If one resident receives a letter or postcard, the others expect news of the outside world to be shared. Communal life in the dining room is banal and predictable. Conversations must be on certain topics and not run off the rails, and Erica finds that she must conform, yet with Maria, she is more her true self. Unfortunately most of the residents remain 2 dimensional shady forms like pieces on a chess board.

It’s as if there are two novels here: Maria’s War and Erica’s life and integration in the retirement village. A BIG coincidence brings these 2 stories together but it is a clumsy device. Maria’s War is not up to the standards of I is for Isobel, Isobel on the way to the Corner Shop, or A Change in the Lighting. The latter is my favourite.

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2018: It’s a Wrap

Towards the end of 2018, I started thinking about which books would make my best-of-year-list. Several of the titles I’d read this past year came to mind, and I began to think that I would, perhaps, have a difficult time narrowing down just a few titles to the list.

Helping with Inquiries: Celia Dale

A husband returns home to find his wife battered to death. The investigating detectives tell the husband, Leonard Henderson, to write down his statement, so we get his version of events which is contrasted to his memories of growing up with a cold, critical mother, and his marriage to the murder victim, Enid. Yes this is the story of a murder, but it’s also the story of a marriage (always impenetrable to outsiders). This is the first book I’ve read by Celia Dale, and it was on my shelf far too long before I finally picked it up. The tale is an insightful look at a claustrophobic marriage and I’ll be reading more from this author who now seems to have faded from view.

New World in the Morning: Stephen Benatar

A middle-aged, married antique seller gets a new lease on life when an attractive female customer walks into his shop. Narrated by 39-year-old Sam, this tale of a man who feels hampered by family life, ‘could’ be very 70s in its portrayal of a man who springs free of his commitments. Instead, in the capable hands of author Stephen Benatar, we see a selfish twerp with illusions of an acting career who proceeds to blow up his very comfortable life. While Sam may think his infidelity is paramount to a heroic selfless act: “one thing was sure … both of them would benefit. I’d be doing it for the three of us,” in reality, even though Sam is in control of the narration, we begin to wonder just who puts up with who in Sam’s marriage.

A Little Love, a Little Learning: Nina Bawden

Told in retrospect, this is the story of short, but significant period in the life of 12-year-old Kate who lives with her mother and stepfather, a doctor. It’s 1953, and a friend of Kate’s mother comes to live with the family. The guest is a rather gossipy but supposedly good-hearted woman, and her arrival sparks a series of events. Through these event, Kate learns that life is not black and white. I usually dislike books written from the child’s perspective but this tale, told with an adult’s view, is simply marvellous. This was the second novel I’d read by Bawden. I wasn’t that keen on the first so I’m happy I tried again.

The Good House: Ann Leary

If forced to pick ONE book as the best-of-the-year, then The Good House would be the choice. I read this early in the year so it set a high standard for comparison. This is the story of a high-functioning alcoholic, a divorced real-estate agent who thinks her drinking is no one else’s business. The unreliable narration here is tart, funny, and entertaining. I laughed out loud several times and was sorry to see this one end. Brilliant.

The Fall Guy: James Lasdun

One lazy summer, Matthew stays at the vacation home of his much wealthier cousin, Charlie. Matthew’s grateful for a place to stay while he mulls over the next phase of his life, but does Charlie really want Matthew there?  Matthew has a thing for Charlie’s second wife, Chloe, and when Matthew discovers that Chloe is having an affair, he finds himself in a moral dilemma. Should he tell Charlie? Nothing is quite what it seems in this novel.

A Change in the Lighting: Amy Witting

Amy Witting is a great favourite. and I knew I’d love this novel. A Change in the Lighting is the story of a middle-aged woman who is floored when her professor husband casually announces that he wants a divorce.  Ella whose whole life for the past 30 years has been raising three children and taking care of the household, doesn’t know what to do. She teeters on the edge of madness but sinks into elaborate rug making. Her children take sides in the divorce war, and yet .. in spite of everything that goes wrong, Ella finds that her life expands into new territory. Witty and wise.

A Wreath of Roses: Elizabeth Taylor

Two childhood friends, Liz and Camilla, spend the summer at the home of Liz’s former governess, Frances. The novels examines the choices made by these women and how taking chances opens up the possibilities of hurt and even danger. In life, we make our choices and then wonder if they were the right ones. Elizabeth Taylor takes that central idea and runs with it. This is a very dark novel. When I picked it up, I wondered why the title was A Wreath of Roses and not a vase or a bunch etc. The word wreath reminded me of death…

Mrs Sartoris: Elke Schmitter

A middle-aged woman who married decades earlier on the rebound finds passion, but will this end happily? No of course not. This is narrated by a woman who seems in control of her passions, but is she? She functions well as an employee and a wife, but like an iceberg, what you see on the surface is only a fraction of what’s there. She may seem in control, but once unleashed, there’s no telling what may happen.

Hell Hath No Fury: Ingrid Noll

A middle-aged woman goes off the rails when she becomes infatuated with a self-absorbed, married academic. A deranged narrator who is also unreliable. How can you go wrong? This was close to being my best read of the year….

Accident on the A-35: Graeme Macrae Burnet

A man dies in a car accident and a police detective investigates. In one sense this is a police procedural (my least favourite crime novel),  but has a crime even been committed? As the investigation continues, the detective finds that the inhabitants of this small French town are less than cooperative. But the crime/investigation is not the main story here: surely it’s the view of small town life, frustrated ambitions and a disintegrating marriage.

Adolphe: Benjamin Constant

A wealthy young man persuades an older woman, the mistress of another man, to become his mistress. The young man cannot live without this woman–or so he thinks, and then he gets her… this rather cynical (realistic) look at love and passion peels back the human psyche and it’s not pretty. But that’s why it’s such a great book.

A Change in the Lighting: Amy Witting

“This world. This human race. It isn’t divided into sexes. Everybody thinks it’s divided into sexes but it isn’t. It’s the givers and the takers. The diners and the dinners.”

In Amy Witting’s gently witty novel,  A Change in the Lighting, Ella Ferguson, mother of three adult children, is stunned when her husband of over thirty years casually and calmly announces he wants a divorce. Ella, a wonderful wife and mother, who has ensured that her husband “never waited for a meal nor wanted for a clean shirt,” is suddenly cast adrift. Not only must she come to terms with her new solo life, but she also, through her relationships with her children, discovers just how shielded her ‘old’ life was.

Professor Bernard Ferguson is (appropriately) standing in front of a mirror when he announces that he wants a divorce. Of course, there’s another woman, in this case it’s the much younger researcher, Louise. After being thrown out by Ella, Bernard stops to ask for clean socks “in a neutral tone, as if he were off to a weekend conference after a small domestic disagreement,” He’s lucky there wasn’t any violence, but then Ella hasn’t yet absorbed the totality of the situation.

Ella breaks the news to her three children: Married teacher, David, difficult, beautiful Caroline who is married to a much older man who works at the same university as Bernard, and Ella’s youngest Sophie, the only one still at home, who’s working as an assistant to a filmmaker.

While Sophie sides completely with Ella, David oversees his mother’s financial interests in the divorce with the idea that he can be some sort of emotionally reasonable conduit. Caroline, however, who’s always been at odds with her mother, strikes out to gain her father’s favour, and as a consequence, Ella’s relationship with her only grandchild becomes a casualty of the fallout.

A Change in the Lighting could have been written with a dire, desperate undercurrent. Certainly Ella finds herself in a difficult position with no job, no money of her own, and  a large, mostly empty house to maintain. In Ella, Amy Witting creates with nimble, gentle humour, a marvellous, and yet perfectly ordinary protagonist, a middle-aged woman who discovers that her sheltered life ends with the departure of her roving husband. While at first, Ella’s life seems to shrivel when her husband leaves, it also begins to expand in new unexpected ways. Sophie brings home her boss, a lesbian filmmaker, and soon there’s a reclusive writer living in the house. While all these changes take place, Bernard, with the predatory Louise lurking in the background, rants about the electric bill, and it soon becomes clear that Ella must make a decision about her home.

Amy Witting, and this is the third novel I read from this author, has a wonderful approach to female madness. I is for Isobel introduced the main character we follow into Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop.  Isobel, in isolation and damaged from a neurotic mother, must learn to accept acts of kindness. In A Change in the Lighting, Ella must accept change, but when her marriage is torn apart, she initially goes through various despondent emotional stages, acknowledging  “no wonder that deserted wives turned alcoholic.” Ella’s life as she knew it begins to disappear and, at times, feeling disoriented she realizes that it would be easy to go mad–that madness is a monster who’s moved in, waiting for her collapse:

When she had got into bed, she considered her day with the monster. Had she made any progress? There were three stages: short spells of quiescence, even moments of peace in which it disappeared altogether, long spells where they co-existed reasonably well, and moments of crisis, when somebody mentioned obsession or some other cause of pain–nothing so bad again as that moment when the thing seemed to be mocking her. It had been coincidence, a trick of the light. 

In hindsight, Ella realizes that there were clues about Bernard’s affair, and as she explains to her best friend, Pam:

“You know, when there’s a noise breaking into your sleep and you don’t want to wake up, you can dream a long, complicated dream that explains the noise away.”

In the fallout of the divorce, Ella discovers a surprising ally in her daughter-in-law Martha, and how true it is that those who marry into a family are often more competent when it comes to deciphering family dynamics. While dramas in her children’s lives spiral around her, and Ella is propelled towards making decisions about her future, she sinks into avoidance by making a complicated rug for her beloved granddaughter. It’s a gift of love and also a marvellous way to ignore her crumbling world:

“So we’re all on the move,” said Martha. “We’ll be moving, too, joining the mortgage belt now that we’ve paid off the unit. Do you have any idea where you’re going to settle? It would be nice to be close to you.”

Ella had no idea on this subject at all. As furniture for the future, she had a remnant of pale green lamé which was to form a stylised arc of sea, the base of a foam of cobweb Shetland wool knitted rather loosely in the traditional Old Shale pattern

Bernard’s desertion of Ella is cold, swift, and brutal, and yet of course he gets his comeuppance. The gentle humour reminds of Barbara Pym–although Pym’s novels are, of course, set in the world of lonely academics, clergymen and spinsters. But I would say if you like Pym, you’ll like Witting and vice versa.

How easy it all was, to get drunk, to go mad, to vandalise, to commit fraud. Perhaps she had always had criminal tendencie; they hadn’t surfaced before because they weren’t relevant, didn’t suit her lifestyle. 

Absolutely on my best-of-year-list

Review copy

(Forgot to add this is one of the books read for the 2018 Australian Women Writers Challenge)

Best of 2015

December again, and it’s time to compile my best of 2015 reading list.

Best Classic Russian:

Notes From a Dead House: Dostoevsky

Want to know what life was like in a Siberian prison camp? … read this. Human nature at its best and its worst. Sentencing to a Siberian prison camp must have come as a terrible blow to Dostoevsky, but this book–a gift to the world–is the result.

Best Non Fiction:

This House of Grief: Helen Garner. This emotionally wrenching non-fiction book gives the reader an insider look at the Farquharson case in which a divorced man was accused of murdering his three sons. While this is the story of the trial, Helen Garner gives us so much more than this–an eyewitness account but also the torturous cost of the trial on those involved. Again–the best and worst of human nature. I want to read Joe Cinque’s Consolation, but after reading This House of Grief, I think it’s best to put some distance between the two books.

Best New American Crime Fiction:

Canary: Duane Swierczynski

I enjoyed Swierczynski’s fantastic Charlie Hardie trilogy, so I was eager to see what he’d achieved with Canary— the story of how a college student gets in over her head when she’s roped in by the police as a ‘confidential informer.’ This is a topical subject and with his usual wizardry Swierczynski creates a formidable, unforgettable heroine in a tale which has many surprises.

Best Classic American Crime Fiction:

The Big Heat: by William McGivern

This moody, hard-hitting tale of corruption involves a lone cop who goes rogue while following a violent path for revenge. Read the book. See the film. Gloria Grahame…. enough said.

Best New American Fiction:

Eileen : Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen was one of the most interesting fiction books I read this year. Not sure what I expected with this one, but someone did a great job with the cover design which drew me to the book in the first place. This is the story of a strange, disconnected young woman who works at a local prison as an office worker. With a horrible home life and no social life whatsoever, something has to give for Eileen, and just what sets her free is the substance of this marvelous, dark tale.

Best Australian Fiction:

Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop: Amy Witting. A sequel to I for Isobel, Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop is set in a TB sanitorium, and Isobel, ill, stuck in bed, is forced to interact with people she likes as well as those she dislikes. This is a heroine we cheer for as she finds a place for herself in an institution, and receives more kindness from strangers than she ever received from her family. People who’ve never been given love, aren’t sure how to receive it, and Witting knows just how to create this on paper. Read both novels.

Best New British Fiction:

A Pleasure and a Calling: Phil Hogan. Regular readers of this blog know that I have a fondness for unreliable narrators. Phil Hogan’s novel is told by a middle-aged, successful estate agent– trustworthy, respectable, reliable…  but is he?… cross this man and your life will suddenly take a turn for the worse. Wickedly funny and dark, this book is nothing less than creepily delightful.

Best Reprinted British Fiction:

A View of the Harbour: Elizabeth Taylor

I read two Elizabeth Taylor novels this year, both from NYRBs–A Game of Hide and Seek and A View of the Harbour. A View of the Harbour, IMO, was the better novel. Perhaps the seaside setting helped, but overall, I found the characters in A View of the Harbour much more interesting.

Best new Crime Series: Glasgow Underworld Trilogy by Malcolm Mackay

The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter

How a Gunman Says Goodbye

The Sudden Arrival of Violence

A punchy trilogy… but wait… Now there’s Every Night I dream of Hell which includes some of the same characters. Will we see this series extended?

Best Irish Crime Fiction:

Gun Street Girl: Adrian McKinty. Sean Duffy struggles with an open-and-shut case which reeks of a staged crime.

Best Scottish Fiction:

For the Love of Willie: Agnes Owens

I’m a long-term fan of the criminally under-appreciated Scottish author Agnes Owens; she hasn’t written a great deal but if you pick a book by Owen, you can’t go wrong.   For the Love of Willie is narrated by a woman who lives in a mental hospital, and regular readers of this blog know that I have a fondness for this type of setting. Draw your own conclusions.

Bext French Crime Fiction:

Vertigo: Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narejac. This two writers, working as a collaborative team, wrote crime with the idea that the ‘nightmare would never end’ for the protagonist. Most of us have seen the Hitchcok film made from the book, but there are many differences, so crime fans shouldn’t miss this. This is one of the titles in the very impressive, new Pushkin Press Vertigo line.

Funniest Book:

Crane Mansions: Gert Loveday

I don’t normally go for books featuring children, but I’ll read anything Gert Loveday writes. This mischievous tale involves a child who ends up at Crane Mansions, Regulatory School for the Indigent. If you think this sounds like a horrible place, you’d be right, but this very funny tale subverts all reader expectations.

Best reread:

Birds of the Air: Alice Thomas Ellis. I never tire of this book. A wonderful story of grief, secrets and family relationships.

A novel I meant to read for a long time:

Pale Blue Ink in a Lady’s Hand: Franz Werfel. The story of a successful bureaucrat who is forced to revisit the sins of his past.

Best Short Story Collection:

Marseille Noir . Crime stories which give the flavor of this city. I moved from watching the French-Belgian film The Connection to reading about crime in Marseille. Review to follow.

 

 

Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop: Amy Witting

“You can get to be like those prisoners who don’t want to leave gaol.”

Earlier this year, I read and loved Amy Witting’s novel I for Isobel, a novel with a oddly-childlike title that did this clever, subtle book no favours. The novel begins with Isobel in miserable childhood, follows her through early years into troubled adulthood and ended somewhat optimistically with the idea that perhaps Isobel would heal and overcome her emotional problems. This brings me to Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop, the second Isobel novel–another book with a curiously childlike title which in no way mirrors the book’s subtle emotional exploration of the main character’s inner life.

Isobel on the Way to the Comer Shop, finds Isobel in terrible straits. She’s unemployed (for that story, read I for Isobel,) working temp jobs for a pittance, and living in a squalid boarding house. But it’s not all bad news. She’s managed to have a story published so those literary ambitions are beginning to pay off. But when you’re living on the edge of poverty, cold, depressed and ill, those conditions aren’t conducive to the creative spirit. The book opens with Isobel in her attic room facing a typewriter, living off baked bean sandwiches, and asking herself how she can write about love when “her own researches into the matter had been disastrous.” Unable to solve or understand the complications of love and sex and just how the two are connected, Isobel takes off for a ‘literary evening’ where she’s clearly unwelcome, and with growing paranoia that may be a descent into madness, she cruelly rejects the kindness of a young male friend. A few days later, close to starvation she decides to make a trip to the corner shop but never arrives….

Isobel is diagnosed with TB and ends up in at Mornington Sanatorium where she, and scores of other patients, undergo months of treatment. Chronic illness peels back the patina of the social self, and leaves, exposed, our true natures, so there are compliant patients, willful patients, and difficult patients all tossed together with the same diagnosis, in the same institution. Some patients wallow in self pity and peevishness while others, and Isobel is one of these, emerge from the crucible of illness, much better human beings for the experience.

At first, probed and examined, an unwanted, contagious patient in a general hospital, Isobel feels like a “parcel. Parcels can be opened and inspected,” but eventually, for the first time in her life, she learns to accept acts of kindness. This begins with the kindness of a volunteer worker, continues with various staff members from the sanatorium and a visit from someone from her past hammers home the lesson that she does matter to people.

She had taken for granted always that when she closed a door behind her, she disappeared entirely from the minds of those behind it. That this was not so was disconcerting: it created a responsibility she did not wish to bear.

There’s a poignancy lingering in Isobel’s story–here’s a young woman who’s never felt that she mattered to anyone, with no loving relationships in her life, she feels valueless, and what irony that it takes a diagnosis of TB in order for Isobel to finally accept that people care about her. Stuck in forced confinement in a hospital bed, she can no longer retreat into her shabby attic, and she’s forced to observe and confront relationships she has with various patients and staff members.

While Isobel is at the sanatorium to cure her body of TB, her confinement and its “enforced intimacy,” effectively brings an emotional cure, and this is partly due to sharing a room with Val, a peevish unpleasant woman, who, in spite of her glaring character deficiencies, receives constant visits from her long-suffering husband, Geoff and daughter, Pauline. Val is oblivious to her own behaviour, but nonetheless makes a canny observation regarding a nurse and her relationship with a patient’s husband. Isobel finds it curious that “Val, who could hunt down unhappy lovers with whom she had no connection, did not seem to notice the” feelings of others. Isobel’s relationship with Val, whose random peevish cruelty, is a faint echo of the behaviour of Isobel’s mother becomes both the bane of her existence and a hurdle for emotional healing. Val’s inchoate frustration with Isobel begins when Isobel starts a knitting project to help pass the time during enforced bed rest. Val takes umbrage at Isobel’s choice of wool, and frustrated and miserable beyond all reason, she won’t let the subject rest:

Is it possible to cause so much misery to another human being, simply by being  oneself? she wondered, feeling a reflection of that misery. No help for it; she must continue to be herself. 

Isobel accepts that she’s an emotional ‘illiterate,’ but to do something about that means taking risks “stepp[ing] out in space,” and not clinging to the safe and familiar. The Sanatorium becomes a refuge for many patients who’ve chosen to remain there and work, and as Isobel becomes more comfortable at the sanatorium and forms relationships with a host of highly memorable characters, she has a difficult choice to make…

In the book’s introduction, Maria Takolander writes that for Witting the “Isobel novels were autobiographical, that it was the ‘terrible truth of fiction’ which helped her ‘to conquer the truth of that situation.’ “ So it should come as no surprise to learn that Witting (Joan Austral Fraser) suffered from TB at one point in her life and drew from these experiences when writing this book. If you are at all interested reading Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop which is going to make my best-of-year list, you read I for Isobel first. Sadly, there’s a third Isobel novel that Witting did not finish before her death.

Review copy/own a copy

I for Isobel by Amy Witting

I for Isobel, and that’s a curious title with a child like ring, from Australian author Amy Witting (1918-2001), is an episodic view of the life of the heroine. This is a coming-of-age novel, a dislikeable term which implies a sort of cookie cutter simplicity that is, unfortunately, underscored by the title. In the foreword to the Text Classics edition, Charlotte Wood admits that she bypassed Amy Witting’s work because “their titles had turned me off,” and that they sounded “girlish, flatfooted, giving off a cutesy, floral whiff.” Yet there’s nothing simple and girlish about Isobel or this novel; this is the story of a young girl hated by her mother who, with some assistance from an aunt, must make her own way in the world, and what’s striking here is the insular nature of Isobel’s life–stripped of nurturing relationships, sustaining friendships and no real mention of the possibility of romance–we are left with just Isobel, a child, and later a young woman who is interesting for her remarkably self-contained ability to absorb life through the sustaining fuel of books while cloaking her nature and desires into acceptable conformity.

In the case of Isobel, we see her first a child trying to establish emotional barriers against her mother’s venom, and  after crucial events, by the end of the novel, Isobel appears to have broken through some fundamental constricting membrane and is on the road to finding her own voice. There’s a sequel to I for Isobel, Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop. Witting had just started a third book in the Isobel series when she died, and that’s our loss.

This wonderful book opens on Isobel’s ninth birthday, and we are immediately dropped into the toxic spite directed towards Isobel by her mother. It’s not that Isobel’s mother ‘forgets’ her birthday–no she continually reminds her of the event and the fact that there will be no celebration:

A week before Isobel Callaghan’s ninth birthday, her mother said, in a tone of mild regret, ‘No birthday presents this year! We have to be very careful about money this year.’

Every year at this time she said this; every year Isobel chose not to believe it. Her mother was just saying that, she told herself to make the present more of a surprise. Experience told her that there would be no present. As soon as they stepped out of the ferry onto the creaking wharf and set out for Mrs Terry’s lakeside boarding house, where they spent the summer holidays, the flat reedy shore, the great Moreton Bay fig whose branches scaffolded the air of the boarding-house garden, the weed-bearded tennis court and the cane chairs with their faded flabby cushions, all spoke to Isobel of desolate past birthdays, but she did not believe experiences, either. Day by day she watched for a mysterious shopping trip across the lake, for in the village there was only one tiny store which served as a post office too; when no mysterious journey took place, she told herself they must have brought the present secretly from home. Even on the presentless morning she would not give up hope entirely, but would search in drawers, behind doors, under beds, as if birthday presents were supposed to be hidden, like Easter eggs in the grass.

It’s through the lack of a birthday present that Mrs Callaghan’s spitefulness is apparent, and we never know quite why Isobel’s older sister, Margaret receives preferential treatment when it comes to birthdays–although of course, in order for spitefulness to carry its full sting, there’s no better way than to concoct an arbitrary rule for one child and not for the other. As scenes from Isobel’s childhood unfold, it seems that Margaret is not loved either. There’s a father there, silent, “tired,” and “pale,” and at meal times, one of the occasions when this toxic family gather together, he keeps his head low, ignoring his wife’s tirades. Over time Isobel learns that her mother has two voices: her so-called “real voice,” (the nasty one) and the one she uses when out in society. Isobel also learns that her mother uses rage to seek some sort of emotional catharsis:

Then she saw her mother’s anger was a live animal tormenting her, that she Isobel was an outlet that gave some relief and she was torturing her by withholding it.

Her father used to do that, sitting silently while her mother raged at him, chewing his food slowly, turning the pages of his newspaper deliberately–doing what Isobel was doing now, But one night he had put the paper down with a fierce thump and shown a white face, wild eyes and a mouth gaping as if his tongue was swollen. His chair had crashed over, he had picked up the knife from the bread board and run at her mother, who was cringing away with her head at a strange angle and a meek frown on her face, her hands out in front of her and the line of blood suddenly across her fingers.

But before that, when he had got up, before she saw how real the knife was and how near, there had been two little glittering points of satisfaction in her mother’s eyes, two little sea-monsters swimming up from …

Isobel’s childhood absorbs only about 1/4 of the book. Soon she’s a young woman who has learned to contain spontaneity and emotion; she won’t learn so much through her own experiences but from watching the lives of others and, of course, from reading–a habit that sustained her throughout childhood. Salvation and sanity to be gained in reading (“Birthdays, injustices and parents all vanished,”) becomes one of the central themes of the book–from Isobel as a child discovering Conan Doyle and sinking into his books and forgetting, temporarily, at least, the fact that her birthday will be ignored. Then later, when Isobel lives in a shabby boarding house under the thumb of the tyrannical Mrs Bowers, her desire to read alienates her from the other boarders. For Isobel, reading is the most important thing in life.

She had been reading the novels of Trollope and whenever she wasn’t reading, no matter what was happening in the outside world, she was conscious of being in exile from Barsetshire.

Through significant episodes in Isobel’s life, events leave various lasting impressions, and it’s through these events that we see Isobel’s personality form. She passes through office life and eventually runs into some students who recognize her as a fellow reader. Through these relationships, she becomes involved, as an innocent bystander, in a side story of sad obsessive love, and again there’s the sense of Isobel observing the human zoo. As a child, Isobel is aware of the need to mask her desires and expectations as exposure only brings pain, and she manages to master these behaviors through her lack of birthday acknowledgement recognizing that not looking for a gift  “was a step towards the kind of person she longed to be but did not have words to describe–someone safe behind a wall of her own building.” It’s probably this type of strategic, deep thinking that saves Isobel from developing into a neurotic mess, but at the same time, she’s still behind that wall and has yet to emerge.

Towards the end of the novel, when Isobel mixes with a handful of students and finds some like-minded people, she is still an outsider. In one memorable scene a student named Kenneth notes the intense behaviour of a young girl who stalks a man who’s rejected her.  Although the rejected girl’s goals are very different from those of Isobel’s mother, nonetheless there’s a link there:

 “It’s amazing though,” said Kenneth, “what you can get away with if you give up caring about anything else, like self-respect and pride and all that stuff. Turning yourself into a projectile, so to speak.”

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