Amy Sackville: The Still Point

This is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time - sheer pleasure from beginning to end. The Still Point is a really exceptional first novel and deserved its Orange Prize long-listing.
I’m not a great fan of the omniscient narrator, but in this book it works. We hover over the books’ characters like god in a helicopter eavesdropping on first one and then another across space and time - from an old house ‘freighted with memories’ in England, to the frozen deserts of the arctic. The author uses the narrative device to pull us in. ‘You can draw a little nearer, if you’re very quiet. Put your face close to his, close enough to feel the gentle rumble and stink of his breath; feel the damp warmth of hers on your own cheek. They fall asleep, as many couples do, first twined and then detached; as we rejoin them they have long since undergone this last conscious act, this delicate separation on the very brink of dreaming.’
Four young people; two marriages - one torn apart by arctic ice before it has properly begun, one in danger of foundering on the sunken reefs of past events. For Emily and Edward the other woman is the North Pole; for Julia and Simon it is the house, with its stuffed polar bear in the attic, the boxes of journals and diaries that Julia spends her days and nights among, the specimens of flora and fauna pinned, cased and hung on the wall. Simon has begun to feel that he is one of them. But in the space of a single day, everything is going to change.
I hope Amy Sackville’s publishers, Portobello, are holding on to her very tightly because I think she’s going to be sensational.

Rose Tremain: Trespass

This is Rose Tremain’s first novel since the Orange Prize winning ‘Road Home’ which I thought was one of her least successful books. So I began reading ‘Trespass’ on the plane to Italy with some reservations - afraid to feel that sense of let-down after all the anticipation of a favourite author.
But this time I wasn’t disappointed. Rose Tremain’s prose is as glorious as ever. ‘Trespass’ is set in London and France. Veronica Verey and her companion Kitty have moved to the Cévennes region of France, ‘incomers’ into a rural French community which views even Parisians as outsiders and has very mixed feelings towards an influx of colonising Brits.
Veronica’s brother Anthony (the Anthony Verey) is an antique dealer in Chelsea, badly affected by the economic downturn and wondering whether he, too, might be happier in France. His search for the ideal property brings him into contact with Aramon, an alcoholic farmer and his elderly sister Audrun, when Aramon puts the family home, Mas Lunel, on the market.
The collision between the two cultures re-animates uncomfortable memories and old rivalries which result in a tragedy which is not a tragedy, but revenge and resolution. Rose Tremain’s skill in unfolding this is so great that it’s only now, sitting down to write about it, that I can see the parallel she was setting up - the two sets of siblings, brother and sister, whose lives have been blighted by the actions of their parents, setting in motion a narrative arc of cause and effect that takes 60 years to complete.
The characters are wonderful - the stoical, resourceful Audrun, the spectacularly awful Anthony, the inadequate, insecure Kitty.
Rose Tremain’s writing is so good that I feel quite sad that so little attention was given to her collection of short stories - The Darkness of Wallis Simpson - when it came out. The title story is wonderful, and her tale of hope and loyalty in a newly liberated Germany - ‘The Beauty of the Dawn Shift’ - should be a modern classic. This is someone who can WRITE.

Andrea Levy: The Long Song

Andrea Levy's new novel, the Long Song, has just been listed for the Orange Prize for fiction and it's a compulsive read.

July is born a slave - the daughter of a sugar-cane worker and a brutal overseer. She is intelligent and resourceful and in 19th century Jamaica the Plantation owner’s sister takes her to train as a personal maid, teaching her to read and write. But soon the island is caught up in the violence and confusion that accompanied the end of slavery. The long desired Abolition brings - not prosperity and peace - but starvation and chaos.
July’s first child - her ‘pickney’ - a son Thomas, is fathered by a ‘free nigger’ who is accused of a murder he didn’t commit. July leaves her baby on the doorstep of a Baptist missionary she knows will give her child a better life than the one she is living. Her second child, fathered by a white man she had hoped to marry, is stolen from her and taken to England. It is the son, Thomas, reunited with his mother, who encourages her to write her own memoir.
July tells her story with humour and compassion. She is a wonderful character and I would happily have spent a much longer time in her company. The song wasn’t long enough. The best books are the ones you don’t want to end. This is a 5 star read.

An Equal Stillness

This is another first novel - Francesca Kay was the winner of the Orange Prize for new writers in 2009. At first glance the structure could be a bit of a cliche. An Equal Stillness opens with the funeral of a famous artist, attended by family members. Someone suggests that the narrator should write her biography and, after initially demurring, the anonymous narrator is persuaded to do so. 'Write the life, they urged me, even at her graveside; no one but you should do it. Who better? You with your command of words, and besides, you were the closest.' Apart from the first and last pages, the life story of Jennet Mallow is told in third person, impersonal mode as if it were a real biography. This device enables the novelist to take an overview of the life, compressing long periods of time into short sections of narrative and it also allows for authorial reflection. The identity of the author/narrator isn't disclosed until the end.

I read the book in one sitting - which says a lot for its readability - and was engrossed by the story of Jennet Mallow, a gifted painter, born at the end of the first world war, who has to struggle for recognition despite unhelpful parents, an early accidental pregnancy, an alcoholic husband and a daughter damaged at birth. Jennet Mallow discovers that, in order to succeed as an artist, you have to be selfish and that runs counter to everything that is drummed into women from birth and then reinforced by cultural stereotypes. Women are the carers, the enablers, the ones who make sacrifices. But, somehow, like many other painters and writers, Jennet manages to juggle home and artistic career, though there are casualties among her children and her lovers.

The biography is somehow less critical than it could be - difficult questions are avoided. This is a romantic viewpoint and - again - the impersonal biographical device allows it. I kept wishing for something more profound which could only have come from writing the novel from Jennet Mallow's own perspective. There is some beautiful prose in this book - sections of pure poetry. It is all very beautiful, balanced, elegant, crafted perfectly to arrive at the final lines - 'Life and death. For that one moment, time suspended, the length of a single held breath, like the spaces between brush strokes, like the sea and land in balance at slack water, in an equal stillness, life and death.' Shame on me to crave a few waves, an altogether stormier sea. This is definitely an author to watch out for.