Two Women: Eleanor Oliphant and Marvellous Ways

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Here is a debut novel, discovered through a writing competition, by an author in her 40s, which has sold for huge sums worldwide.  This title was chosen by my Winterborne Kingston Book Group, known as 'Splinter'.

Amazon says:  Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend.

Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything.

One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted - while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life.

Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than… fine?

An astonishing story that powerfully depicts the loneliness of life and the simple power of a little kindness

What I thought:

From the outset I realised that Eleanor is something of an oddball.  I confess at first I thought she was, as we tend to say these days of someone who is a bit odd, obsessive, or antisocial, 'on the spectrum'. Being so precise about her food choices and meals, buying two tickets for a gig in case she lost one, and taking people literally, leading an orderly life, these all spoke of some kind of autism, I thought.   But as the narrative progressed I realised that rather, Eleanor was lonely and a damaged person, used to being let down in life.  During the course of the novel we gradually find out why she is isolated.  There was much humour in the portrayal of Eleanor in the context of her interactions  at work, her shopping habits, her regular consumption of two bottles of vodka  (somehow this did not sit as quite convincing to me).  I laughed out loud at her puzzlement after she had opted for a Hollywood wax.  Even odd titbits such as her buying a copy of Razzle for Sammy! And her shopping expedition to buy clothing was equally funny.  Then there are poignant things as when Eleanor goes to a hair salon and thanks Laura for “making her shiny”.   But where did her naïve belief that she was destined to connect with the second-rate self-obsessed pop star for a romantic relationship come from?  Did this fit with the character as she was being revealed by the writer.  Certainly it gave a mechanism for the emotional crash that was to come.  

When you see a section entitled Bad Days, you think you know it is going to go end badly. I did guess that the mother was no longer alive and the phone calls were taking place in Eleanor's head.  Something of the language the author used in that dialogue was not quite authentic to my ear and that is what started me thinking.  Raymond is a character of continuity throughout it all and I wondered if  he and Eleanor would end up together.  Gail Honeyman does not go that far for her reader, but in the end you do feel that Eleanor has been rescued from the loneliness that has dogged her all her life.  

A Year of Marvellous Ways by Sarah Winman

A Year of Marvellous Ways begins on the bank of a Cornish creek in
1947. The year absolutely helps me to ground this novel in historical
terms, I was born that year so it gives a good context. And Cornwall
was the destination for many family holidays between the years of
1976 and 1984. We did not do abroad when our children were young.
Where Winman talks of creeks off the Carrick Roads, the ebb and
flow of tides, the gathering of cockles to coddle and limpets to pickle,
this is so familiar to me. I thought her descriptive prose was beautiful
and vivid with a real feel for nature. I loved the descriptions of the
orange starfish, many of them getting washed onto the shore and the
idea that they are stars that have fallen to earth. There was lots of

imagery which was beautiful.

The arrival of Francis Drake, the young man only recently returned
from the battlefields of France on his errand to deliver a letter to a
bereaved father from his son, a fellow soldier who didn’t make it
home. On the face of it you might think that Francis has been the
lucky one to survive the war but there are traumas in his past and he
has only recently had the shocking experience of Missy drowning
herself before his very eyes. I found this passage very shocking. I
liked Missy, she introduces the idea of a mermaid, how life can
change. I connected with her character rather better than Marvellous.
Yes, this was a character that the author wrote many words about,
she is after all the raison d’etre of the novel. But I found her a bit
tiresome sometimes, whimsical, ambiguous, contradictory. I
sometimes found it difficult to separate the real from the ‘magic’ this is
the so-called genre magical realism and I find it a bit frustrating. You
can sometimes not know where you are. Also known as 'marvellous
realism' it essentially represents a view of the real world whilst also

adding or revealing magical elements.   It does not ring my bell 

(Is it a coincidence that the main protagonist is called 'Marvellous'?) 

A good definition for Magical Realism is 'It is what happens when a highly detailed realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe'.

In some ways the narrative almost reads like a fairytale, complete with 

a journey into the woods; characters with strange, winsome names
and enchanted pasts (Marvellous tells the story of her mermaid
mother, shot shortly after her daughter’s birth, mistaken for a seal
frolicking in the water); and a gentle kind of magic is available to those
in need: a young girl drops an egg white into a glass of water to see it

take the form of the face of her one true love.

                                         ………………… 0000000...……………...

Here is a Short review from the Guardian below, "gripping suspense", "pacey plot"
...…...do any of Splinter recognise this as the book we read?

Waiting is what 89-year old Marvellous spends the year 1947 doing, in
an isolated Cornish hamlet, although she isn’t sure what she is waiting for. This
might seem like a less-than-engaging narrative device, but Sarah Winman creates
gripping suspense while unfolding Marvellous’s memories, from lonely nights spent
“willing her life to change” to the time “Whatshisname” was lured in her direction by
a Louis Armstrong song playing on the wireless. Paths cross in unexpected ways in
this pacey plot. An unlikely friendship develops at the core of the compelling tale
when Marvellous meets a troubled young soldier, Drake. Storytelling rejuvenates
Drake: as Marvellous shares stories of her life resonating with the transcendent
power of love, Drake learns how to marvel at life again, seeing the extraordinary in
the ordinary. “Everyone had a limit,” writes Winman, engrossingly showing
characters pushed past their breaking point. The novel’s surprising denouement is
also well worth the wait. .

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Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

One of the good things about belonging to a book group is that, if run democratically, you will often find yourself reading books you would not have chosen for one reason of many reasons.  So with Rebecca which had slipped past me at various points in my reading life when I might have stumbled upon it.  For example at the time that we were taking annual holidays in Cornwall I found a copy of Vanishing Cornwall in a local bookshop and found it both informative and engagingly written: readable but writing of a very high calibre.  This was my first literary encounter with du Maurier.  I subsequently read The House on the Strand (written more than thirty years after Rebecca)which is a compelling read:

Wiki:  "Like many of du Maurier's novels, The House on the Strand has a supernatural element, exploring the ability to mentally travel back in time and experience historical events at first hand - but not to influence them. It has been called a Gothic tale, influenced by writers as diverse as Robert Louis Stevenson, Dante, and the psychologist Carl Jung, in which a sinister potion enables the central character to escape the constraints of his dreary married life by travelling back through time. The narrator agrees to test a drug that transports him back to 14th century Cornwall and becomes absorbed in the lives of people he meets there, to the extent that the two worlds he is living in start to merge. "

And then I found another title in second hand, A Cornish Childhood, by A L Rowse and then I moved on.

And now thanks to the Val de Saire book club I have met Rebecca.

Rebecca is a thriller novel by English author Dame Daphne du Maurier. A best-seller, Rebecca sold 2,829,313 copies between its publication in 1938 and 1965, and the book has never gone out of print. The novel is remembered especially^[1] for the character Mrs Danvers, the fictional estate Manderley, and its opening line:

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

— The second Mrs de Winter

Literary technique

The famous opening line of the book "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." is an iambic hexameter. The last line of the book "And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea" is also in metrical form; almost but not quite an anapestic tetrameter.

What I thought:

A novel that has never been out of print and sold nearly 3 million copies in the 30 year interval after its publication.  In 2017, it was voted the UK's favourite book of the past 225 years in a poll by bookseller W H Smith!!!

For me it started as a slow-burner of a novel. Mrs Van Hopper and her companion are staying at a hotel in Monte Carlo. Both these characters made me squirm a bit, Mrs Van Hopper’s shameless pushiness and the younger woman’s reticence and self-effacing manner. These are the opening chapters and then with the marriage of the young woman and Max de Winter the narrative takes off. Our ‘heroine’ was led like a lamb to slaughter. Du Maurier cleverly drew the creepily manipulative and poisonous Mrs Danvers well and the new young wife’s fearfulness and blind innocence at times made me want to shake the book at her! It was hard to feel sorry for her you just wanted her to show some mettle. She does finally gain confidence and become more assertive when Mrs Danvers is humbled. It was hard to warm to any of the characters except the man on the beach who refused to give up his secrets even though it was for fear of being locked into an asylum. 

Gradually the novel shifts from a psychological drama about obsession to a thriller: will the killer be unmasked and brought to justice. I thought this plot was cleverly written and at just the right pace. The twists with regard to Rebecca’s visit to the gynecologist and her confrontation with Max in the boat hut were clever. I did guess that Rebecca’s shooting was something which she engineered. 

A great ending to the book, rightly famous in the world of literature.

Two further comments: As the story reaches its climax I found myself wanting Max to ‘get away with it’. This sometimes happens when I read a book and a character is so obviously guilty but the author has contrived to make you engage with the guilty one. I think that is skillful writing because the author has manipulated her reader. Secondly it never occurred to me until I came to write this review that the second Mrs de Winter is never named. I went to the opening chapters to check what it was, assuming I had forgotten it, only to find we are never told. I wonder what prompted du Maurier to use that device? Perhaps it was to emphasize her identity as the second Mrs de Winter rather than a person in her own right and perhaps also to subordinate her to Rebecca whose ‘presence’ is constant and who is mentioned so often in the text."