An unsettling read: A Cupboard Full of Coats

What can I say about a book that made me want to give the writer a long, hearty, hug? Yvvette Edwards, in this debut novel, makes such a powerful statement about abuse and love, desire and forgiveness. She makes you sit up and pay attention. Woman, you are so cool.

The book was long-listed for the Booker in 2011 and other than being a thumping good read, is a critical voicing of issues that are often only whispered about. It tells the story of Jinx, a Caribbean-origin, British girl, brought up by her widowed mother, the lovely and luminous Joy. The narrative begins 14 years after the violent murder of Joy by her abusive boyfriend. It works around a series of relationships and traces patterns of love, dependence, and almost debilitating desire.

It is incredible how Edwards is able to detail a history of abuse through the evocation of the simplest images. She cajoles her characters into remembering and narrating, thereby expiating themselves of the guilt each of them seems to have been carrying for years on end. Hers is a nuanced exploration of the burdens of motherhood, of the secret, keen pleasure of desiring someone completely "wrong", of being utterly selfish in love. How then, can you not fall in love with the book? It has a searing honesty that is impossible to ignore or to devalue.

A Cupboard Full of Coats might not be the most well-written book of the year. It sure is the most powerful.

Death Comes to Pemberley: Austen re-visited?

I fell in love with P.D. james when I read the first Adam Dalgliesh mystery. Cover her Face. The book had me hooked. It reminded me of the classic Christie. The setting was period. The English countryside. Contemporized with a generous dose of sexual desire and intrigue. When I then heard of Death Comes to Pemberley, I HAD to read it. A sequel of sorts to the eternally entertaining Pride and Prejudice. Murder in the Victorian country house, beautiful men and women, familiar characters. Got to be good, right? 

Well, the book was procured, begun with much fanfare and devoured ravenously to the last page. 

Unfortunately, there isn't much I'd be able to say about it that would live up to the hype. Admittedly, it is well-written. The historical research is detailed and rendered as authentic as is possible. The characters are all logical extensions of Austen's world. James spends a considerable amount of time setting the background, developing the histories of Elizabeth and Jane and Bingley and Darcy. She gives them the right clothes, the right words and the right emotions. Despite the correctness of all formal elements, the book doesn't work.

Elizabeth and Darcy are passionately in love. "In love" like in a chick-flick. He wants to hold her hand so he can feel his world righting itself. She looks up to him as only a Victorian woman can. Jane is as much in awe of Bingley as she was when he was walking all over her in deference to the snob values of his best friend and his sister. The man is still a pushover. As a 21st century reader, the least I expected from a "Murder Mystery" based on Austen's novel was a little bit of spice. Darcy unhappy. Stuck in an "unsuitable" marriage. Bingley having an affair on the sly. Elizabeth running a women's rights group. Jane fed up of bearing children every alternate year. At the least. Instead, what we get is an insipid extension of the period drama minus the edgy intensity that has so far defined James's work.

The writer spends most of her energy and the reader's time in getting the background right. Therefore, there is the working class, circumscribed by it's desire to please and it's recognition of it's rightful, subservient place in the order of things. There is the usual distraught woman, the threat of scandal and subsequent overthrow of the social order. Feeble clues in the form of initials carved on tree trunks and a rather unconvincing murder. It follows logically that the final revelation of the murderer and the cause of the crime are even more unconvincing. 

Anti-climactic doesn't even begin to describe it. It's a yawn and then two more.
What really bothers me, at the end of this rather unsatisfactory read, is why did James do it? Why take on characters that daunt you instead of setting you free? Why handle someone else's story as a historical relic instead of making it your own? Why negate the very idea of an adaptation? That, and not the murder, is the real mystery I wish P.D.James had solved for me.

Gregory and Me

I have a problem with Phillipa Gregory. I like her. I like her narrative sense. I love how she uses a historical context and makes it unbelievably contemporary. I love how her characters are real, flawed, complex people. But I hate how she never keeps that promise she makes in that seductive, snaring first chapter.

The Other Boleyn Girl, The Constant Princess, The Queen's Fool, The Virgin's Lover and The Other Queen have all been engaging and engrossing. So has the Wideacre trilogy. I loved the proto-feminism of Wideacre but the novel left me immensely disturbed. So did Meridon. If there was ever a contest for moral stand-taking I'd lose by the largest margin. But what Gregory's heroines do is beyond my comprehension. The self-centred heroine of Gregory's Wideacre is not a throwback to the manipulative Scarlett of Gone with the Wind but an extreme representation of a warped desire to claim what she sees as her right. It doesn't make sense. Not to me, at least. I read on in morbid fascination. She gives us the fantastic Meridon who remains but a pale shadow of her alter ego, her granma, the enigmatic Beatrice. The Other Queen recreates the same sense of enigma. It's impossible to see Mary develop into a fully fleshed character and not fall in love with her. And yet, she disappoints.

This almost-rant comes about because I've just finished reading Fallen Skies. Lily Valence begins as a precursor of the flower-child of the 1960s. She's sweet, unspoilt, radiant and promising. There are all the makings of the rebel there. and yet she conforms to the role of the victim. She remains passive and becomes vacuously boring. So does Charlie. Stephen's a brilliant sketch but gets overstretched in his inane acts of violence. The novel also suffers everytime a 'miracle' takes place- when Rory starts speaking, when Coventry gives up his silence. Speech as the only medium of self-articulation becomes limiting. The flavour of the 1920's, so effectively begun, falls flat. The 'minor' characters come in with a lot of promise and then fade into the background.Poor Charlie gets the shortest shrift of all. If only the canvas had been a little more organized, the novel would make a much better read.

And I come back to how I love Gregory and can't wait to read The White Queen but I do so hope the beginning will sustain and the middle will be as interesting as the absolutely dazzling start that Gregory always and always gives to her novels.