Apricots ripe to bursting
The cat is there, her paw in the water, waiting. You think what it's like to be lazing to the surface like one of those carp, plump and ripe and stupid. And then the claw, like steel ripping you through, scooping out the guts and white strings of your body's innards so quickly that they think they are still alive, and they wince in the daylight. You think what that slash of the claw would feel like as it emptied you. It would be like having your heart held up to you, in front of your face. The thing nobody sees, the naked heart, red and wincing, thinking it is still alive.Helen Dunmore, With Your Crooked Heart
So I've just come off my Helen Dunmore kick, and I'm in withdrawal. The New York Public Library has eleven copies of her latest novel, The Siege, and every one of them is in the hands of some lucky person who isn't me.
Dunmore writes sensuously, vividly; her characters often run from their pasts, or try to, but they glory in their bodies. Her combination of sensual pleasure and emotional acuity reminds me of Colette. Her subjects vary, but she writes most often about women who are fierce with love, and the jealous rageful passions of family, and gorgeous gloomy landscapes. She also writes about beautiful women with a sharpness that is very different from the usual fantasy: young women glorying in the power of their attraction in Your Blue-Eyed Boy, Zennor in Darkness, Burning Bright, and then finding out exactly what the limits of that power are; With Your Crooked Heart's Louise, who is glorious because she knows she is; Nina from Talking to the Dead, who makes her body into a weapon, turns herself into an acerbic lean urbane sophisticate because it's the opposite of what her beloved and hated sister Isabel is, or seems to be; Catherine from A Spell of Winter, who seems the helpless focus of attention for people who want to touch her, possess her, a blankness or a mystery drowning in her own allure.
With Your Crooked Heart (1999) - The flap copy made this seem like a story of the rivalry between two brothers, and pretty unappealing; ironically, it's ended up being my favorite of Dunmore's books. Ugly, dangerous, hard-working Paul raises pretty, dangerous, drawn-to-the edge Johnnie, a brother eleven years his junior; Paul marries Louise, who has a daughter, Anna, after a one-night stand with Johnnie. Most of the book takes place eleven years later: Paul has divorced Louise and moved with Anna and his new wife to Wales, leaving Louise in possession of the London house; Louise is an alcoholic, overweight, miserable, and increasingly out of touch with the world; and Johnnie may have finally gotten into more trouble than he can handle.
The heart of the book is Louise, passionate, useless, and loving; she is a neglectful mother, and Paul is quite right to take Anna out of her care, but you can see why Anna herself misses her so fiercely, and is determined to get back to her. And Louise is in some ways doomed; she is caught between two brothers who cannot define themselves except in terms of each other, so of course she never really knew what she was getting into.
The book is told in many voices, third-person, first-person, even second: Louise, Anna, Paul, minor characters like a cosmetic surgeon Louise goes to see, a friend Anna makes in Wales. The voice that is surprisingly absent is Johnnie's; he has only a few pov scenes, and if I have any complaint about the book, it's that I'd like to get more of his sense of himself and his relationship to Paul, which is so charged it's almost sexual, which has made him so determined to make his own life instead of accepting Paul's gifts and devouring love that he'll fuck things up to make sure at least he's fucked them up on his own.
Your Blue-Eyed Boy (1998) - "There are things you should know about blackmail, in case it comes tapping at your door," Simone begins. "There's what it does to you, and there's what it makes you do. I used to think I knew what I could be made to do." Simone's a judge in rural England, working a job she doesn't much like but needs desperately, to pay the debts incurred by her husband's bankruptcy. Her husband has not quite had a breakdown, and is not quite willing to really deal with the situation; their two sons are unhappy with the recent move from London, and with the family tensions they can sense but not understand. And then Simone receives a letter from a lover she hasn't seen in twenty years, a Vietnam vet she had a summer affair with in America, when she was eighteen and the war had just ended. A letter, and some photographs.
The book is less about what is done to Simone or what she is made to do than about the things she chooses to do, the dark aspects of herself she refuses to face. The book's tone is strangely distant, I think because Simone is in almost absolute denial of the sheer rage she feels at how she's become trapped in her own life. It's clear by the end that she is much, much more dangerous than any blackmailer or stalker.
Talking to the Dead (1996) - Nina, a freelance photographer in London just beginning to be successful, goes down to the suburbs to visit her sister Isabel, who has just had her first child. The visit unravels some of the lies the sisters tell themselves, about who they are, who they want to be, what happened to their infant brother who died of crib death when they themselves were children, long ago.
I think Talking to the Dead and Your Blue-Eyed Boy are the novels that got Dunmore a reputation as a writer of thrillers, although that's not quite what either book is. They're chilling psychological horror more than anything else, Shirley Jackson revisited, creepiest when they're focusing on the how the stories we make up about ourselves shape our memories.
Someone did a study that showed whenever people were given any two objects, they described the objects in terms of each other: both couldn't be big, one had to be the bigger one and one the smaller one. Melissa Scott talked about this in Conceiving the Heavens as one of the dangers in characterization for any story about a pair of characters: people tend to emphasize the oppositions, to write about the characters in relative terms, instead of giving each his or her own identity. One of the things it made me think of was how in two-child families, especially when the children are the same sex, parents tend to push their children into complementary roles: one child will be the good one, one the bad one; one the smart one, one the athletic one; and so on.
Dunmore is very, very good at probing the intricacies of that kind of relationship, and Talking to the Dead is probably the book where she does her most intense study of it. Nina wavers between thinking of herself as the bad girl and as her sister's victim: both these things are true, and neither is. And Nina's self-definition falters when Isabel's seems to, when their family myths begin to break down.
A Spell of Winter (1995) - This is a historical novel set in the late Victorian/early Edwardian era, going through the end of WWI; like A.S. Byatt's "Morpho Eugenia" in Angels and Insects, it talks about the things the Victorians couldn't talk about, directly, and like Byatt's story it's haunted by literary antecedents. In Dunmore's case, the antecedent is the Gothic novel, very specifically Wuthering Heights. Unlike Bronte's Cathy, Dunmore's Cathy isn't an overt rebel; her apparent passivity and her willingness to accept whatever comes to her without struggling for more seems to frighten, enrage, and attract the people around her. The book is about the isolation of Cathy's grandfather's estate, the mysteries of her parents (her mother ran off, which apparently drove her father mad), her relationships with her brother, the housekeeper Kate who is her surrogate mother (and, to judge by the names, surrogate self), her grandfather, and the former governess who appears to be in love with her.
Forbidden passions! Mysterious antecedents! Winter on isolated estates!
I loved all that, of course. But then Dunmore doesn't seem to have any idea how to end things. I think she has some idea of World War I and its necessary changes being the catalyst that breaks Cathy out, but Cathy is so passive this doesn't quite read convincingly, and the end depends too much on Cathy's connections to two characters whom we never learn enough about.
Burning Bright (1994) - Nadine is a sixteen-year-old runaway who has been set up in a decaying Georgian house in London by her much-older lover, Kai. The old lady, Enid, a sitting tenant, tries to warn her about Kai, and is lost in recollections of a past love affair that ended tragically.
I'm doing a bad job of describing this, because I think it's actually my second favorite of the novels. Nadine's brisk practicality and hidden longing for parenting charm me, and I love the matter-of-fact subversiveness of how weird all the emotional and sexual relationships are, and how contrary to conventional myth this isn't bad. Nadine's sexual relationship with Kai appears to be quite happy and pleasurable; it's not that which causes the problems. And the happy ending (at least if you think it's happy, and I do) is a tabloid's horror story. (All of the plots--including Enid's tragic lesbian affair--are very much the material of tabloids; it reads like someone issued Dunmore a challenge to make a real novel out three random newspaper headlines and "The Snow Queen.")
The main problem is one plot strand depending very heavily on outrageous coincidence. Dunmore deals with it pretty deftly--the coincidence is in fact never actually named; the reader gets it from context--but still.
Zennor in Darkness (1993) - Another historical novel, this one set in Zennor on the Cornish coast of England during WWI. D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda are minor characters, unpopular outsiders who protest the war (and Frieda's German to boot); for a few chapters there, I even thought I might want to read Lawrence's novels, for the first time ever. (All I've read by him is a very chilling story called "The Rocking-Horse Winner," and nothing I've ever read or heard about him has made me particularly eager to expand the literary acquaintance.)
The focus of the novel is Clare Coyne, a young woman whose father's family is decayed Catholic gentry and whose mother's family is solid Cornish working class. There are some lovely bits of description, although the language is neither as direct nor as intense as it would get in the later books; and there are some typical first-novelisms, like Clare being an artist, and the book itself being very concerned with Lawrence's writing and the Role of the Artist, although that isn't worked in well with the rest of the novel's focus on Clare's family relationship.
Love of Fat Men (1997; stories 1990-1997) - Dunmore is a better novelist than short story writer. Mostly literary slice-of-life stories, epiphanies, anti-epiphanies, well-done but not especially memorable. Several of the stories are about a Finnish girl/woman named Ulli at various points in her life, but the separate pieces don't make a stronger whole. "Anninna" is a nice (but again, not extraordinary) retelling of "Thumbelina" that's about parental love, and the necessity of letting children go.
So I've just come off my Helen Dunmore kick, and I'm in withdrawal. The New York Public Library has eleven copies of her latest novel, The Siege, and every one of them is in the hands of some lucky person who isn't me.
Dunmore writes sensuously, vividly; her characters often run from their pasts, or try to, but they glory in their bodies. Her combination of sensual pleasure and emotional acuity reminds me of Colette. Her subjects vary, but she writes most often about women who are fierce with love, and the jealous rageful passions of family, and gorgeous gloomy landscapes. She also writes about beautiful women with a sharpness that is very different from the usual fantasy: young women glorying in the power of their attraction in Your Blue-Eyed Boy, Zennor in Darkness, Burning Bright, and then finding out exactly what the limits of that power are; With Your Crooked Heart's Louise, who is glorious because she knows she is; Nina from Talking to the Dead, who makes her body into a weapon, turns herself into an acerbic lean urbane sophisticate because it's the opposite of what her beloved and hated sister Isabel is, or seems to be; Catherine from A Spell of Winter, who seems the helpless focus of attention for people who want to touch her, possess her, a blankness or a mystery drowning in her own allure.
With Your Crooked Heart (1999) - The flap copy made this seem like a story of the rivalry between two brothers, and pretty unappealing; ironically, it's ended up being my favorite of Dunmore's books. Ugly, dangerous, hard-working Paul raises pretty, dangerous, drawn-to-the edge Johnnie, a brother eleven years his junior; Paul marries Louise, who has a daughter, Anna, after a one-night stand with Johnnie. Most of the book takes place eleven years later: Paul has divorced Louise and moved with Anna and his new wife to Wales, leaving Louise in possession of the London house; Louise is an alcoholic, overweight, miserable, and increasingly out of touch with the world; and Johnnie may have finally gotten into more trouble than he can handle.
The heart of the book is Louise, passionate, useless, and loving; she is a neglectful mother, and Paul is quite right to take Anna out of her care, but you can see why Anna herself misses her so fiercely, and is determined to get back to her. And Louise is in some ways doomed; she is caught between two brothers who cannot define themselves except in terms of each other, so of course she never really knew what she was getting into.
The book is told in many voices, third-person, first-person, even second: Louise, Anna, Paul, minor characters like a cosmetic surgeon Louise goes to see, a friend Anna makes in Wales. The voice that is surprisingly absent is Johnnie's; he has only a few pov scenes, and if I have any complaint about the book, it's that I'd like to get more of his sense of himself and his relationship to Paul, which is so charged it's almost sexual, which has made him so determined to make his own life instead of accepting Paul's gifts and devouring love that he'll fuck things up to make sure at least he's fucked them up on his own.
Your Blue-Eyed Boy (1998) - "There are things you should know about blackmail, in case it comes tapping at your door," Simone begins. "There's what it does to you, and there's what it makes you do. I used to think I knew what I could be made to do." Simone's a judge in rural England, working a job she doesn't much like but needs desperately, to pay the debts incurred by her husband's bankruptcy. Her husband has not quite had a breakdown, and is not quite willing to really deal with the situation; their two sons are unhappy with the recent move from London, and with the family tensions they can sense but not understand. And then Simone receives a letter from a lover she hasn't seen in twenty years, a Vietnam vet she had a summer affair with in America, when she was eighteen and the war had just ended. A letter, and some photographs.
The book is less about what is done to Simone or what she is made to do than about the things she chooses to do, the dark aspects of herself she refuses to face. The book's tone is strangely distant, I think because Simone is in almost absolute denial of the sheer rage she feels at how she's become trapped in her own life. It's clear by the end that she is much, much more dangerous than any blackmailer or stalker.
Talking to the Dead (1996) - Nina, a freelance photographer in London just beginning to be successful, goes down to the suburbs to visit her sister Isabel, who has just had her first child. The visit unravels some of the lies the sisters tell themselves, about who they are, who they want to be, what happened to their infant brother who died of crib death when they themselves were children, long ago.
I think Talking to the Dead and Your Blue-Eyed Boy are the novels that got Dunmore a reputation as a writer of thrillers, although that's not quite what either book is. They're chilling psychological horror more than anything else, Shirley Jackson revisited, creepiest when they're focusing on the how the stories we make up about ourselves shape our memories.
Someone did a study that showed whenever people were given any two objects, they described the objects in terms of each other: both couldn't be big, one had to be the bigger one and one the smaller one. Melissa Scott talked about this in Conceiving the Heavens as one of the dangers in characterization for any story about a pair of characters: people tend to emphasize the oppositions, to write about the characters in relative terms, instead of giving each his or her own identity. One of the things it made me think of was how in two-child families, especially when the children are the same sex, parents tend to push their children into complementary roles: one child will be the good one, one the bad one; one the smart one, one the athletic one; and so on.
Dunmore is very, very good at probing the intricacies of that kind of relationship, and Talking to the Dead is probably the book where she does her most intense study of it. Nina wavers between thinking of herself as the bad girl and as her sister's victim: both these things are true, and neither is. And Nina's self-definition falters when Isabel's seems to, when their family myths begin to break down.
A Spell of Winter (1995) - This is a historical novel set in the late Victorian/early Edwardian era, going through the end of WWI; like A.S. Byatt's "Morpho Eugenia" in Angels and Insects, it talks about the things the Victorians couldn't talk about, directly, and like Byatt's story it's haunted by literary antecedents. In Dunmore's case, the antecedent is the Gothic novel, very specifically Wuthering Heights. Unlike Bronte's Cathy, Dunmore's Cathy isn't an overt rebel; her apparent passivity and her willingness to accept whatever comes to her without struggling for more seems to frighten, enrage, and attract the people around her. The book is about the isolation of Cathy's grandfather's estate, the mysteries of her parents (her mother ran off, which apparently drove her father mad), her relationships with her brother, the housekeeper Kate who is her surrogate mother (and, to judge by the names, surrogate self), her grandfather, and the former governess who appears to be in love with her.
Forbidden passions! Mysterious antecedents! Winter on isolated estates!
I loved all that, of course. But then Dunmore doesn't seem to have any idea how to end things. I think she has some idea of World War I and its necessary changes being the catalyst that breaks Cathy out, but Cathy is so passive this doesn't quite read convincingly, and the end depends too much on Cathy's connections to two characters whom we never learn enough about.
Burning Bright (1994) - Nadine is a sixteen-year-old runaway who has been set up in a decaying Georgian house in London by her much-older lover, Kai. The old lady, Enid, a sitting tenant, tries to warn her about Kai, and is lost in recollections of a past love affair that ended tragically.
I'm doing a bad job of describing this, because I think it's actually my second favorite of the novels. Nadine's brisk practicality and hidden longing for parenting charm me, and I love the matter-of-fact subversiveness of how weird all the emotional and sexual relationships are, and how contrary to conventional myth this isn't bad. Nadine's sexual relationship with Kai appears to be quite happy and pleasurable; it's not that which causes the problems. And the happy ending (at least if you think it's happy, and I do) is a tabloid's horror story. (All of the plots--including Enid's tragic lesbian affair--are very much the material of tabloids; it reads like someone issued Dunmore a challenge to make a real novel out three random newspaper headlines and "The Snow Queen.")
The main problem is one plot strand depending very heavily on outrageous coincidence. Dunmore deals with it pretty deftly--the coincidence is in fact never actually named; the reader gets it from context--but still.
Zennor in Darkness (1993) - Another historical novel, this one set in Zennor on the Cornish coast of England during WWI. D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda are minor characters, unpopular outsiders who protest the war (and Frieda's German to boot); for a few chapters there, I even thought I might want to read Lawrence's novels, for the first time ever. (All I've read by him is a very chilling story called "The Rocking-Horse Winner," and nothing I've ever read or heard about him has made me particularly eager to expand the literary acquaintance.)
The focus of the novel is Clare Coyne, a young woman whose father's family is decayed Catholic gentry and whose mother's family is solid Cornish working class. There are some lovely bits of description, although the language is neither as direct nor as intense as it would get in the later books; and there are some typical first-novelisms, like Clare being an artist, and the book itself being very concerned with Lawrence's writing and the Role of the Artist, although that isn't worked in well with the rest of the novel's focus on Clare's family relationship.
Love of Fat Men (1997; stories 1990-1997) - Dunmore is a better novelist than short story writer. Mostly literary slice-of-life stories, epiphanies, anti-epiphanies, well-done but not especially memorable. Several of the stories are about a Finnish girl/woman named Ulli at various points in her life, but the separate pieces don't make a stronger whole. "Anninna" is a nice (but again, not extraordinary) retelling of "Thumbelina" that's about parental love, and the necessity of letting children go.