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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When God was a Rabbit

When God was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman

1968. The year Paris takes to the streets. The year Martin Luther King loses his life for a dream. The year Eleanor Maud Portman is born.

Young Elly's world is shaped by those who inhabit it: her loving but maddeningly distractible parents; a best friend who smells of chips and knows exotic words like 'slag'; an ageing fop who tapdances his way into her home, a Shirley Bassey impersonator who trails close behind; lastly, of course, a rabbit called God. In a childhood peppered with moments both ordinary and extraordinary, Elly's one constant is her brother Joe.

Twenty years on, Elly and Joe are fully grown and as close as they ever were. Until, that is, one bright morning when a single, earth-shattering event threatens to destroy their bond forever.
Spanning four decades and moving between suburban Essex, the wild coast of Cornwall and the streets of New York, this is a story about childhood, eccentricity, the darker side of love and sex, the pull and power of family ties, loss and life. More than anything, it's a story about love in all its forms.

What Sarah Winman writes about her own book:

Elly is the kind of girl who grows up too fast. She doesn’t like to play with little girls her age; she prefers the company of Mr. Golan, her elderly neighbour. But her friendship with Mr. Golan takes a dark turn, and only Elly’s brother, Joe, knows her secret. Joe gives Elly a pet rabbit, which she names god, to alleviate the loneliness of her childhood. Elly soon finds another best friend: Jenny Penny, a new girl in town who has a chaotic home life. But Elly and Jenny are soon separated, too --- Elly’s parents decide to open a bed-and-breakfast in Cornwall, and Jenny disappears without a trace. Friendless in her new town, Elly leans on her family for support, especially Joe, who is struggling to come to terms with his sexuality.

Even as an adult, shadows from childhood haunt Elly’s life. She learns that Jenny Penny murdered an abusive husband, and they renew their friendship through letters Jenny writes from jail. Elly finds her calling as a newspaper columnist, writing about the relationships she has lost and found. Joe tries to start a new life in New York, but he disappears in the chaos of 9/11. Elly manages to track Joe down, but he has lost his memory and feels stifled by his sister’s devotion. As Joe’s memory gradually returns, he reveals Elly’s childhood secret: Mr. Golan molested her. Elly’s loved ones can finally help her heal, and she learns to rely on the family and friends who have stood by her during her years of silence.

What did I think:

This book has so much of real life crammed into it: childhood friendships, child molestation, abuse of women, a lawyer's guilt at betraying a victim by his clever defense of the guilty perpetrayor, homosexual love, attachment to pet animals, terminal illness, hostage taking and ransom, life-shattering events on a grander scale, mystic stuff which defies rational explanation, marital contradictions and idiosyncracies.  That is a long list but never did I have the sense that the writer was trying to pack in as much drama as she could.  Because sometimes writers can over egg their pudding and lose the attention and credulity of the reader.  It was a highly plausible narrative of love and loss, I turned the pages feeling absolutely engaged with the characters.  I thought her narrative around the 9/11 event was well done, not over-dramatized and the lost and found story around Joe was well judged.  I thought the events around Arthur and the errant coconut was a nice touch, what was bad had been turned around.  Joe had been lost and found.  Arthur's sight had been lost and found.  And I thought her ending was masterly because really we have no idea where Elly and Jenny Penny will go from there.............  I loved it.

In the Country of Men

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

Nine-year-old Suleiman is just awakening to the wider world beyond the games on the hot pavement outside his home and beyond the loving embrace of his parents. He becomes the man of the house when his father goes away on business, but then he sees his father, standing in the market square in a pair of dark glasses. Suddenly the wider world becomes a frightening place where parents lie and questions go unanswered. Suleiman turns to his mother, who, under the cover

of night, entrusts him with the secret story of her childhood.

In the Country of Men is Matar's debut novel first published in 2006 by Viking. It was nominated for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. It has so far been translated into 22 languages and was awarded the 2007 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize as well as a host of international literary prizes. The book was also nominated for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in the U.S.

The book follows the plight of Suleiman, a nine-year-old boy living in Tripoli in Libya, stuck between a father whose clandestine anti-Qaddafi activities bring about searches, stalkings and telephone eaves droppings by Qaddafi's state police, and a vulnerable young mother who resorts to alcohol to bury her anxiety and anger. The only people he has to turn to are his neighbour Kareem, and his father's best friend Moosa. The book provides a description of Libya under Qaddafi's terror regime, and a narration of ordinary people's lives as they try to survive the political oppression.

Patres nostres

Our Fathers by Andrew O'Hagan

Jamie returns to Scotland with his grandfather, the legendary social reformer Hugh Bawn, now living out his last days on the eighteenth floor of a high-rise.  The young man is faced with the unquiet story of a country he thought he had left behind and now he listens to the voices of ghosts, and what they say about his own life.  It is a story of love and landscape, of nationality and strong drink, of Catholic faith and the end of the old left.  It is a tale of dark hearts and modern houses - of three men in search of Utopia.  Jamie Bawn's journey home will leave him changed beyond words - beyond the words that darkened his childhood.

The story, set in post WWII Scotland, is also about the “coming of age” of Jamie, a young boy growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father and a weak, ineffectual mother. One day, after a brutal beating of his mother by his drunken father, thirteen year old Jamie realizes he can no longer tolerate his home environment and moves in with his father’s parents, who have provided the only source of stability throughout his young life.

Jamie remains with his grandparents until he finishes school and then moves to England to strike out on his own. He returns to Scotland ten years later for an extended visit when he learns that Hugh, his grandfather, is dying. As he and his grandfather reminisce about the past, Jamie thinks to himself: “Once upon a time it was Hugh that had shown me, a young, saddened boy, how to grow up, how to make use of the past, and live with change. And now I was here: I would try to show him.”
Ultimately, this is a story about forgiveness because, in going through this process with his beloved grandfather, Jamie comes to the realization that his parents too were victims of their own personal torments and did the best they could with what they had to work with at the time – which is all any of us can do.

Such is the quality of the writing, the verisimilitude of the narrative, that the novel reads like an autobiographical memoir.

This was O'Hagan's debut novel, shortlisted for the 1999 Booker prize.  He went on to write four more novels and all five have either been nominated for Awards, or received literary prizes, or both.  The fifth novel, The Illuminations, published in 2015, was longlisted for the Man Booker.

Maya's Notebook

Maya's Notebook by Isabel Allende

In a nutshell this novel, encompasses a crime story, an addiction-recovery narrative, and a family drama..

Abandoned by her parents as a baby, Maya has been brought up by her tough grandmother Nini and her gentle grandfather Popo. But at school, the teenage Maya finds herself drawn towards the wrong crowd. Before she knows what’s happened, Maya’s life has turned into one of drug addiction and crime.  Things go from bad to worse as Maya disappears into the criminal underworld. To save her from her old associates, Nini sends Maya to a remote island off the coast of Chile.  Safe amongst her new neighbours, Maya feels compelled to write her story and slowly she begins to heal. But can she learn to live with her scars, and will her past ever catch up with her?

Character portraits and sketches of other lives abound, although Maya is the main focus "with hair dyed four primary colours and a nose ring".  In the opening pages we find Maya on a remote island in the Chiloe region of Chile, on the run from "the FBI, Interpol and a Las Vegas criminal gang."  .

                          

Fortunately, she has a loving grandmother who has arranged this sanctuary, and despite recent ordeals, her confident, upbeat nature soon charms the locals. She is smart and curious, and the novel brims with her discoveries about the archipelago and its people: tourist fantasies and harsher realities are described with great feeling. On the island Maya begins to write down her story, from her grandmother's flight from Chile in the early days of the Pinochet regime to her own childhood in Berkeley, teenage loss and three years of plummeting crisis. At the same time, the Chilotan narrative moves forward, and Maya gets involved in village life, forms close bonds, and begins to uncover horrors from the past.

Maya is the lightest of narrative guises: wise beyond her 19 years but convincingly coltish, she gives us an outsider's observations ("happiness seems kitsch to Chileans") and has a chirpy, wry sense of humour; when she falls in love, she writes her adoration and despair with hyperbole, exclamation marks and teenage wholeheartedness. The sections describing her own past are dominated by the energetic narrative impetus and lose track of any feelings of abandonment, terror and hurt at the story's centre. This may be due to the pressure applied by the crime plot, or the need to drive this book in the direction it is headed – towards a story of survival.

Maya used to read the dictionary with her beloved grandfather, something we're reminded of when she drops words such as "lapidary" and "telluric". Harder to reconcile are the almost anthropological observations, such as this, of her teenage gang: "We walked along dragging our feet, with our cells, headphones, backpacks, chewing gum, ripped jeans, and coded language." Little of that coded language finds its way into the book, even during intense scenarios with her best friends and sometime boyfriend, a hapless fellow in low-slung baggy jeans. The slang is mild: "dumbass", "man". The crime boss she works with in Vegas explains, "Heroin doesn't kill: it's the addicts' lifestyles that do…" The effect is a bit like taking a bus tour through the desperate parts of Las Vegas, a guide delivering facts about life on the streets. You see a mugging through the window, but the bus has moved on.

The prioritising of story over voice suggests that it's not the aim of Maya's Notebook to plunge the reader into the grim existence of a real-life Maya; this is a tale of revelations and resolutions, and the plot is more answerable to its own turns than to the brutal possibilities of reality. Despite the observations about the number of young people lost to street violence, crime and slavery, or because of them, the driving force of this novel is ultimately resilience – the power of love and acceptance to face down terrible things.

In this worldview, perhaps, the wise perspective of the narrative voice can elide with the young narrator: "I'm not going to be weighed down [by past mistakes] till the day I die," Maya insists. Her argument is compelling. She hits some nasty snags on the way to her rock bottom, but emerges (after a rather idyllic sounding rehab) with her joy in life intact, able to heal others. Whether a consequence of characterisation, magical thinking or authorial determination, this girl and her community are going to be all right. "The whole world is magical," says Manuel, the man who has survived much and becomes Maya's protector, and the book is best read in that spirit.

Of a Sad and Troubled Upbringing

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson's memoir is a moving book of Winterson's childhood and adolescent awakening as she discovers that she is a lesbian. "Why be happy when you could be normal?" is the real-life question of her adopted mother, as Winterson is evicted, at 16, for taking up with a second girlfriend (the attempts to exorcise her sexuality after the first having been unsuccessful).

             

Jeanette's experience of home life under the aegis of Mrs Winterson was bleak.  She was beaten, she was often hungry, she was left all night on the doorstep by a mother whose religious excesses might even have been a secondary influence on the household, the first being her depression, which was pervasive and relentless. She was not well loved. Jeanette describes Mrs Winterson, who, in between her violent homilies and dishonest violence, had like any good tyrant various crucial absurdities – "she was one of the first women to have a heated corset. Unfortunately, when it overheated it beeped to warn the user. As the corset was by definition underneath her petticoat dress, apron and coat, there was little she could do to cool down except take off her coat and stand in the yard."  In the end the story of Jeanette's early years ends in escape.  

The writer then skips forward a quarter century, and she has just split up from her girlfriend, the theatre director Deborah Warner. She finds her adoption papers in her father's effects, when he is moving to an old people's home. She has a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide.  "In February 2008 I tried to end my life," she writes, describing an attempt at gassing herself in a sealed car before realising that her cat was trapped inside with her. "My friends never failed me and when I could talk I did talk to them. But often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place." She begins her journey to track down her biological mother. 

She describes the beginnings of her current relationship with the renowned psychoanalyst, Susie Orbach, with whom she thought a romance would not develop, "because Susie was heterosexual and I have given up missionary work with heterosexual women". Orbach is portrayed in tender, maternal terms as she accompanies her on the search for her biological mother. Indeed, one senses Orbach's influence in passages on abandonment and the loss of mother love.

The quest to find her mother, Ann, and their first meeting in working-class Manchester, leads to a painful acceptance of the fact that a pre-adoptive identity - and its sense of wholeness - can never be regained. In some ways, this meeting takes her back to Mrs W and the dual role that she occupied as a mother and a non-mother: "I notice that I hate Ann criticising Mrs Winterson. She was a monster but she was my monster".  In the book Winterson unpicks the damage her adoptive parents wrought  on her. The peace she makes with her adoptive family is perhaps more significant and evocative than the more complicated and double-edged peace that comes with tracking down her birth mother.

Commentary with excepts from The Guardian and The Independent Reviews.

Sanguine Malum

Bad Blood by Lorna Sage

"Lorna Sage, professor of English at the University of East Anglia, has written an almost unbearably eloquent memoir of the unlikely childhood and adolescence that shaped her. Nothing else I have read, save Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman, destroys so successfully the fantasy of the family as a safe place to be or describes so well the way in which rage, grief and frustrated desire are passed down the family line like a curse, leaving offspring to live out the inherited, unresolved lives of their forebears."  So reads the review of this book in The Guardian.

In a sense this is what autobiography is about: the ways in which your own story is not really yours at all, but a version of the tale of your parents or grandparents. These are the ways in which you become, as Steedman puts it, "not quite yourself, but someone else", and this is what makes it such a dissatisfying genre for those wanting a reassuring or comfortable description of the growth of an individual mind.
      

Tales of disappointment form the bedrock of Lorna Sage's story. Her embittered grandmother, 4ft 10 and round as a barrel, longed for her hometown of Tonypandy, where she had some class as the daughter of a shopkeeper. She was consumed by an apoplectic hatred of all men, particularly her husband, whom she blackmailed from the other side of the house. Sage's mother swiftly retreated from the "violently unhappy" marriage of her parents into the "magical world of unreality", assuming a fey impracticality far from the model of the super-efficient 1950s housewife.

The "fierce monogamy" of Sage's parents took on a violence of its own: their intimacy allowed no one in and made orphans of their two children. Her father, a distant figure, happiest during the war when he had a role and a mission, later gallantly protected his spouse from the passions of her family - and particularly those of Lorna, fiery and bookish and thus an inheritor of Grandpa's bad blood.

It is Sage's Byronic grandfather, the local vicar, who provides the centre of the story, and around whom Sage forges her identity. Cursing a marriage that has neither love, understanding nor imagination, he turns to a life of unabashed wickedness. Indulging in lust and drink, he becomes for his granddaughter a "defiant and grandly outrageous" figure in his self-defeating recklessness, a Gothic outsider with all "the glamour of the undead".  (I despised the man as I read about him).

In Sage's celebration - or invention - of the glamorous alter ego beneath her grandfather's desperately limited life, Bad Blood is at its most gripping, and its most moving touch is her tribute to his thwarted ambition and ridiculed desires. Finding an old pocket diary for 1934 and decoding the banal secret life it records -"It was the diary of a nobody" - she quotes his hurt at being "taunted" by his teenage lover, a friend of his daughter, for resolving to escape the philistine values of the parish and the vicarage and to start a new life as a writer. "That freelance existence never materialised for him," his grand-daughter writes; "here are his words, though, in print at last." The vicar of Hanmer is redeemed from the "squalor of insignificance" he fought against. The heir of his bad blood has rewritten his story, giving to its grim drudgery the grandeur and dignity of a Greek tragedy.

A central theme in Bad Blood is places and spaces, and how we learn to shape ourselves around them. Hanmer, on the borders of Wales and England and where Sage spends the first part of her childhood, becomes a metaphor for the suffocation of living "in-between": between the second world war and the 1960s, between the covers of books when there is no space left elsewhere, in the limited space between other people's lives. People and houses are imprisoning.

It is only in the printed word that Lorna can breathe; even then she feels Grandpa looking over her shoulder as she reads.  Sage is interested in lives that don't fit: family black sheep, misshapen marriages, homes too small to house either the hatred of their inhabitants or their exclusive love. Either way, other people are hell. Having lived sandwiched between these two marriages, Sage, believing she is still a virgin, unwittingly finds herself pregnant at 16 and embarking on her own marriage. Both she and Victor, the child's father, are doing their A-levels.

It is here that the story closes, and it is given a happy ending. A daughter, Sharon, is born; Victor and Lorna both gain firsts in English from Durham University, and both join the English department at the new University of East Anglia. There are no doubt many other endings she might have chosen, but Sage breaks off at the point at which her life, if not her blood, became her own.

PS  Sage's era pretty much echoes my own.  She was born four years before I was but her life and mine are divergent. Such grandparents as I knew were principally my paternal grandmother of whom I was so very fond, and a maternal stepmother with whom I never connected.  She was rather distant, and cold.  My family life was dominated by the father figure, my mother being the ultimate home-maker but with no encouragement to have a life, however minor that component might be, of her own.  A few aspects of Lorna's teenage life echo my own though.  I also met my husband at a tender age, seventeen, and he was eighteen.  We had hiccups but married when I was 21 and after a very brief working life I was confined at the age of 24.  With two more children before I was 29, I never went back to a conventional working life.  Lorna Sage discovered her ability and passion for words at a very early age, it would be years later before I would discover the real delight in reading and writing a little bit of prose.  I also got science and that is a whole other story...........

My favourite line from Sage's book:
"Being five foot three, tongue-tied and blonde I mostly passed muster, except that I was so unskilled in small talk that I sometimes blurted big words (hypocrisy, or pretentiousness), which jumped out of my mouth like the toads in the fairy tale before I knew it."