Of poetic justice
disappear, leaving only traces of their existence. For Lizzie’s mother, it is not her work but a small baby who is the only solid legacy following her death. Lizzie struggles to care for the child as the dangers unleashed by the revolution come closer to home.
Compelling as ever though the writing is, Birdcage Walk seems less original than some Dunmore novels. But she still outshines most writers. by Susan Hill Chatto & Windus, £10.99 SUSAN HILL impresses with the sheer variety of her work which ranges from the Gothic drama of The Woman In Black, made into a stage play that has been running for almost 30 years in London, to her pacy Simon Serrailler detective novels.
Her latest is an understated but intense little gem. Deftly and in few words, Hill evokes the late 1950s when unmarried pregnancy and same-sex love held unbreachable stigmas.
Olive Piper is an only daughter whose chilly mother wanted three sons. She has inherited some of her parents’ detachment and although she is liked at school and at university she is never at the heart of a group.
A voracious reader, she is intellectually sophisticated but ignorant of life and finds herself pregnant after a night with her boyfriend Malcolm Crowley. Olive decides to go it alone at a maternity home for unmarried mothers.
In some of the most moving scenes of the book, Hill describes the plight of the young women in the home. The atmosphere is antiseptic and unforgiving and the women are kept in ignorance of what to expect, separated from those who have already given birth in case they are fed “horror stories”.
Numb from the pain of giving up her child for adoption, Olive completes her studies, takes a job teaching and is delighted to discover the ability to bring books alive to her pupils. Her joy attracts one of her senior colleagues. But the relationship is doomed from the outset.
The novel is at times almost unbearably painful as Olive attempts to make sense of a world for which she has been poorly prepared.
A short but stunning achievement on Hill’s part. by Polly Clark Riverrun, £14.99 THAT Polly Clark is a poet is never in doubt throughout this imaginative novel, written with poetic force. It focuses on two poets, one real, the other fictitious (the latter clearly based on Clark’s own experience) who find themselves at sea 80 years apart in the Glasgow suburb of Helensburgh. Both are outcasts. The real poet is WH Auden who, newly out of Oxford, takes up a teaching post at boys’ prep school Larchfield in Helensburgh in the early 1930s. He is already a published poet but is regarded by fellow staff, parents and school governors with suspicion, all of them subliminally conscious of his homosexuality.
And yet it is the Adonis-like master, “locked into the governor’s family like a jewel in a safe”, who is the real threat to the small boys in his charge.
Chapters about Auden are intercut and occasionally overlap with those about poet Dora Fielding who, heavily pregnant, has moved to Helensburgh with her architect husband Kit.
For Kit the move is a return home but not for Dora, left alone each day with her premature baby. Dora has apparently incurred the wrath of the upstairs neighbours who are local church leaders.
It seems to Dora that they park their cars to block out her light, encourage children to play on her lawn, spy on her and report her to social services.
Kit fails to understand, making Dora feel she is losing her mind and she is only partly sustained by her love for her child and by the discovery that Auden had also found himself in exile in Helensburgh.
What she experiences is “an emptiness, a nameless grief” as she strikes up imaginary conversations with the poet.
This is a beautifully constructed novel with a wealth of detail and characterisation. Moving and wonderful. by Alison MacLeod Bloomsbury, £16.99 THIS is a collection of varied stories which range across time and place from 1920s Nova Scotia to the Broadwater Farm riots in 2011.
MacLeod moves between fact and fiction, introducing well-known people including Sylvia Plath, Anton Chekhov and Tony Blair who is captured in a citizen’s arrest. One story tells of cardiac specialist Denis Noble awaiting a heart transplant. Professor Noble, MacLeod tells us in her acknowledgements, is a friend of hers.
This blurring of reality and imagination gives the stories an unsettling quality.
The mundane and the extraordinary are close bedfellows. A young woman comes out of mourning and buys a beaver coat for a dance, an act with epic consequences.
The unhappiness of one narrator’s marriage makes her think of her idol Princess Diana. The title story is a tribute to the last Bloomsbury survivor, Angelica Garnett, who reimagines her childhood at Charleston.
The stories exercise a hypnotic effect, providing a kaleidoscope of life, colour and anguish.