I was a teenager when I first started reading Barbara Trapido’s novels, and I haven’t returned to them since. They were special to me, rich with details that have stuck with me over the years. Katherine with her John Donne and jam in a net shopping bag, Stella with her orange crêpe hair and her cello, Christina’s essay on the comedies, Alice misquoting and Jem quoting Blake — ah, sun-flower! weary of time!
I’ve wondered whether a reread is in order, if just to glean something about who I was when I first loved those books. I’ve suspected that there is a lot of class anxiety baked into that love, and a lot of loneliness. Trapido’s worlds always seemed so full of culture and connection, of domesticated eccentricity, of the delicious ache of the outsider’s yearning. Part of me is searching for these things in all the books I’ve read since then.
I found them in abundance, and many other things besides, in Marina Kemp’s The Unwilding, which is one of my most-loved books so far this year. Zoe and Nemony, the primary point-of-view characters, are both outsiders, and therefore great observers - the ideal women to take the reader into the elite world of famous novelist Don Travers, Nemony’s father and Zoe’s sometime mentor. There’s a simultaneous ferocity and blandness in Zoe that made me glad of the Nemony sections, despite my enjoyment of her immersion in Don’s Sicilian summer home. Nemony was a more exciting character to me, although the intense focus on her experience of early motherhood had me return to the Zoe sections with some relief - and, consequently, sympathy for the decision she made for herself around parenting.
Kemp does a gorgeous job of evoking the frustrating and lonely experience of being the youngest sibling in a chaotic family. It’s not lost on Nemony that when her name gets abbreviated to ‘Nemo’, she’s being addressed as ‘nobody’. During their last summer in Sicily Nemony is only ten; her three older siblings are all teenagers, and the injustice of Nemony’s consequent exclusion absolutely fizzes on the page. I felt it all with her - that devastating fear that all the energy in the family, all the available personalities and talents, are used up, and there will be nothing left for her. Later on we find out, from her adult perspective, that even then her father had given up on her, didn’t find her interesting or worthy of attention. The oldest sister, Teresza - Tree - is the only one who seems to recognise Nemony’s quality. Nemony has a ‘writer’s eye’ (p70), Tree tells Zoe, and in saying so Tree is foreshadowing what will eventually connect our two protagonists.
Tree’s own trajectory through the novel is tragic, and beautifully realised in a few point-of-view chapters. Nemony’s observation of her sister early on devastated me before the tragedy is even realised; comparing her brother and her oldest sister, she notes that
life appeared more simply to Malachy: a straight path, so that he always seemed to see the destination clearly. Tree could become distracted; she could pour her considerable energy and purity of vision into what ended up being merely a detour. It cost her (p74).
This jolted me into a recollection of the conclusion of Middlemarch, in which the ‘full nature’ of Dorothea Brooke is said to ‘spen[d] itself in channels which [have] no great name on the earth.’ As a person of diverse energies and abilities, I pay close attention when I meet women like this in books. I hope that the story will be kind to them, knowing that it usually isn’t, because life isn’t usually especially kind to women like this. If we can survive until our forties, I think it gets easier. Lucky me! And Dorothea.
And lucky Zoe, for that matter. Her midlife blossoming is confidently prophesied by Don, who doesn’t realise that he’ll be the target of her emerging energy and strength. He’s a powerful man with no real empathy or generosity, and it’s profoundly irritating when he tells her she needs to stop feeling like an imposter, during her Sicilian summer:
You have to learn to stop questioning yourself. It’s a symptom of youth, and of your sex too, I’m afraid. You waste crucial time questioning yourself. Gradually you’ll learn to stop, and then you’ll produce your most powerful work. You can’t rush that process, I’m afraid. You’ll have to wait and see it out. For most women of talent, like you, it happens in their forties (pp 116-117).
It’s an observation that makes sense - it’s certainly taken me this long to even realise how paralysing the self-questioning is. But the infuriating part of it is that Don, for all his talent, is just a lech who spins this whole speech into what feels like a booty call made fifteen years in advance. ‘I hope I still know you then,’ he says, as I puke into my mouth a little bit. If only men like him used their intellect to consider how they are complicit in the stifling of young women’s voices, and used their power to uplift them.
That’s not Don’s story - of course, he doesn’t learn - but there’s a reckoning of sorts, and it’s a satisfying one, that builds on all the seeds Kemp cleverly plants along the way. I adored little details like the cathartic letter-writing by Etta and Alice, and the torn up notes that feature later on. I loved the way Nemony describes the stifling of her strength under the Liam regime, not least because it made me think of poor Dodo under Casaubon’s rule, and myself in certain previous circumstances:
Around the tidal edges of his moods I was rendered a second-guessing creature with no solidity, no clear outline. I am ashamed to think of it. My conviction such a shrunken thing (p189).
Unlike poor lovely Tree, Nemony, like Dorothea, gets a chance to wake up her conviction, to rediscover herself and to find some strength again, and Kemp drives the novel with wonderful pacing towards a quietly satisfying conclusion.
Other books I’ve loved so far this year are Patrick Gale’s Take Nothing With You and Tessa Hadley’s Clever Girl. Both address the complexity of the class mobility that comes with early intellectual or artistic talent. Take Nothing With You is the story of a cellist who, despite his magnificent talent, doesn’t end up pursuing a musical career. I wasn’t quite sure whether the author intended the bleak class commentary I read in the novel’s conclusion. You could perhaps take his teacher’s words in earnest when she tells him he’ll always have the cello as a source of enjoyment in life. I felt that her words were a devastating rejection. Perhaps I’ll write more about it at another time, but for now it just feels too sad.
Clever Girl was bleak, too, but brilliant, and totally inspiring to me as a writer. My debut novel is about an introspective and talented woman who has experienced profound visions since early childhood, and it can be difficult to pitch this to readers in a way that feels authentic. Hadley does it gorgeously in her depiction of a tree cult the protagonist invents as a child:
When eventually sleep came, I seemed to hear the soughing of trees outside in the empty air. I understood all about those trees, I grasped what they were: how they existed and did not exist, how both contradictory realities were possible at once (p62).
I suppose this kind of thing might be a hard sell to a lot of readers, but if you’ve been that child, creating magic at the edges of your mundane and constrained world, feeling it take over your whole mind and heart, you’ll be utterly thrilled whenever you find it in books. I wanted more of it in Clever Girl, but even a little was delightful to find.
I’ve read and enjoyed four of Lily King’s books this year, and especially liked The English Teacher. I quite liked Confessions by Catherine Airey, though I much preferred Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow as a story about the deep intellectual and emotional joy and pain and vulnerability of shared play. I thought Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang was dark and superb and did a much better job of exploring the pianist’s life than August Blue by Deborah Levy; the latter was a lovely book, but as a pianist myself I never felt it evoked the specific experience of playing. The protagonist could have played any instrument and the book would probably have felt the same.
I read Coco Mellor’s Blue Sisters as it has had so much positive press, but it has nothing on Kemp’s work as a depiction of sibling relationships, for all that its much-lauded opening insists on the visceral connections between sisters. I tried again to read Cloud Atlas as I’ve loved other writing by David Mitchell, but I found myself too frustrated by it to finish. I was irritated by Harriet Constable’s Vivaldi hit piece The Instrumentalist, as it uses a clichéd depiction of synaesthesia to avoid any recognisable description of playing the violin, though I do recognise that it was a well-plotted and engaging piece of historical fiction.
Much of my reading lately has been contemporary fiction that broadly shares a genre with my own novel. Now that I’ve mostly finished writing, I plan to branch out again and read some different genres. I’m currently reading Philip Marsden’s The Spirit Wrestlers, which I discovered very serendipitously after a period of research on the Doukhobors for a subplot in my novel. I also plan to check in with contemporary speculative fiction, as I’ve been a little bit disengaged from that world for a while.
And in the meantime, I am painstakingly rebuilding my violin technique, trying to improve my upper range in singing, and deciding which of my many new ideas are insisting most urgently upon expression in written form.
