Book of the month, 

Wild Boy Jill Dawson, Hodder & Stoughton/Sceptre,London 2003

Wild Boy tells the story of Victor, a feral child discovered in the woods of Aveyron, in 1799, shortly after the French revolution. Dawson takes material from the account of his attempted rehabilitation by Dr Jean Marc Gaspard Itard at the Deaf-Mutes Institute in Paris and fictionalises it in order to discuss issues of human nature and the veneer of civilisation.

     The novel unfolds through three viewpoints. Dr Itard himself, educated, full of new ideas, bursting with revolutionary zeal for the concept of a 'new man' free from the restraints of old and corrupted customs and ideas, sees the wild boy as a challenge, the chance to prove his theories that man is nothing without civilisation and education. Yet by making him struggle with his repressed personality, Dawson continually links his inner fears to Victor's wildness. Over several years of trying to socialise Victor with only limited success, Itard becomes as much pupil as teacher as he gradually realises that in some ways he is just as handicapped as Victor in his inability to overcome his own fears.

Madame Guerin, housekeeper at the Institute and the person charged with the practical care of Victor, scorns education, supplying  the emotional element that Itard is unable to express. Yet Madame Guerin constantly recalls her participation in the bloodthirsty acts of the revolution, acts that Itard would never have contemplated. She is both terrified by and ashamed of her own capacity for violence during the 'terrors'.

Victor, being speechless, is voiced through authorial representations of his experiences. Throughout, we see his defamiliarised view of the social world, how meaningless it is for him compared to the natural environment and the need to survive in it. 

In this text, Victor is the catalyst that reveals the constraints of civilisation, the way all our experience must be mediated through language and thought so that we can never just 'be' as we were at birth, never know our original being. The novel ends in disillusion for all three, how can it be otherwise? The problems Dawson raises here are beyond our abilities to solve, there is only the hope that by becoming aware of them, by trying to make room for our inner selves in our personal lives, we might little by little effect change in social practices.

Despite delving into some deep issues Wild Boy  is a wonderfully entertaining read and can be read simply as a fascinating insight into an amazing historical event that has also been the subject of many other stories and articles. Dawson's book is one to revisit over and over, a multi- layered text that surprises the reader anew each time.

Because I Must  Hilda Lewis,  Jarrolds Publishers Ltd, London. 1946.

It is many many years since I first encountered Hilda Lewis's Because I Must. It gripped me so much at first reading that I never forgot it. Years later I engaged a book search firm to find me a copy and ever since it has been a treasured item in my personal library, to be recommended to others, to be re-read and savoured and to contribute to my own efforts at writing the psychologically disturbed character.

     The protagonist, Nellie Woodstock is the strongest example of the unreliable narrator that I have ever come across. She is not just unreliable but skewed beyond imagining, yet her narrative is so plausible that the reader constantly questions her own thoughts about Nellie's credibility. Lewis never misses a beat in the first person voice of Nellie, as we follow her life from the age of ten to its tragic conclusion.

     The opening lines of the novel promise a hard-hitting story. "I remember the day they hanged my mother. A hot gritty day with a hard blue sky. August it was and only a week off my birthday. I was going on for eleven." Lewis does not disappoint, maintaining dark menace and intrigue, building the tension to the final page.

     Ten year old Nellie is in an orphanage with her small sister Toria, following her mother's execution. Nellie's only wish, once she realises she will never return home to her mother, is to protect and be with her sister but from the beginning everything is hard for her, while her sister, the pretty, the sweet one, is showered with good fortune.

     The time of the novel is not specified, but the period seems to be around 1930. Nellie's account of her life with her mother seems too modern for Victorian or Edwardian times, yet we are still in an era of large houses with servants. Nellie is on the road to a life in domestic service while Toria is adopted into a wealthy family, enjoying all the advantages that Nellie has wished for her. This is a well used plot but because of Lewis's mastery of the unreliable narrator, because we see only Nellie's version of events, the reader is constantly on a knife edge of indecision. Does Nellie really love her sister or is she jealous of her? Is she really trying to protect her or to secretly harm her? Is she trying to fool the other characters (and the reader) or is she fooling herself as to her real motives for her actions?

     The skewed narration is the icing on the cake. Underneath this lies the changing times between two world wars as Nellie moves from being the sole servant in petty-bourgeoisie households to settling into one of the remaining large wealthy households with a traditional retinue of domestics. The characters and the period come to life from the nasty, petty Mrs Rogers, her first employer, to the gracious Mrs Wyvill, mistress of the large house. Through Nellie's eyes we meetToria, now the pretty, well-educated, yet kind-hearted daughter of the house as well as seeing the rest of the servants' lives at first hand.

     Nellie's voice never wavers, just slightly uneducated, but always eloquent in explaining and excusing her behaviour, and always leaving the reader undecided as to the reality of what she reports. Through the narrative stalks the spectre of Nellie's mother, the hangman's noose still round her broken neck, her head skewed and twisted, haunting Nellie at every turn, yet despite this harbinger of doom,  Nellie is drawn inexorably to her own fate. The reader is faced with the question, does history repeat itself through our genes, or is it the treatment meted out in life that shapes our characters? and finally does cause excuse our actions? At the end of the day, are we not responsible for our own behaviour?

     The novel builds to its dramatic and inevitable climax. It could easily be a simple melodrama, an overdrawn and cliched plot, but Lewis's prose lifts it out of this into a compelling narrative, a voice that has haunted me for more than a quarter-century and I am sure has deeply influenced my own writing.

EARLIER REVIEWS.

The Dark Threads: A Psychiatric Survivor's story  Jean Davison, Accent Press  2009

  Buy Dark Threads on Amazon here

A fantastic non-fiction narrative of the author's experience as a psychiatric patient in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jean Davison tells with simplicity how, as a young, questing teenager, she was labelled with psychiatric illnesses she didn't have, and was given drugs and shock treatments she didn't need. The book descibes the journey of the mental health patient from functioning person in a soical world to a self- fulfilling prophecy of dependence on psychiatry and its treatments ad infinitum. Davison takes you through a past littered  with human beings whose human rights are denied, whose  lives are bounded by institutionalisation and drug states and also details the institutionalisation of the keepers, the doctors and nurses whose blinkered behaviour could only fail the patients  who relied on them for help. This could be a dreary litany, yet another of those dreadful childhood/teenage pasts which fill the supermarket  bookshelves at the moment, yet Davison's story sees her rise like the phoenix from the ashes of despair to become a strong and competent survivor, fully able to take her place in society. The treatments and institutions she encountered may have changed, been modernised. Attitudes of mental health staff and the man in the street also have changed, but the labels are still there and so are the drugs. For this reason Davison's book is important reading,  not just for professionals working in the field of mental health, not just as a memoir of the past, but as a reminder to us all of the need to really see our fellow beings as human and to recognise their real  needs. 

This Panopticon Life by Tracey Currall   Erbacce Press publications, Liverpool. 2007

The Panopticon was an invention that allowed prison guards to observe every aspect of their domain on all sides. Tracey Currall explores aspects of modern life, his life, in this collection of poems, yet returns repeatedly to themes of war, specifically to the effects of war on personal life, on the life that must be lived once war or service in war is over.

These poems remind us of the wider ramifications of war, how the individual must continue to live with the mental effects of war, long after any physical injuries have healed. Much is made in the news of the death of our soldiers; programmes are made about the physical rehabilitation of wounded heroes, but there is little mention of the prolonged effects of post traumatic stress disorder. It is something we feel uneasy about, as if people should move on, rise above  it somehow. In the first world war, shell-shocked men unable to fulfil their duties were often shot as cowards. The image of the brave soldier, the glory of war does not sit well with the reality of blood and horror. In these poems, Currall shows us how once experienced, these horrors never really go away, but are hidden away in the psyche to leap out at any moment. Currall's war is the Falklands conflict, still reverberating in his poetry after almost thirty years. Reading the poems,  I was reminded of a film I saw on TV recently about a young soldier in the Falklands who went missing in a state of shock and was later persecuted as a coward (I can't recall the title of this film, but I'm sure someone will tell me, in any case it had a powerful effect and it's message was the same as that in Currall's poems - that there are no answers.

The publication of this collection at this time is particularly relevant as once more we embroil  ourselves in the futility of war and these poems highlight the timelessness of  war, the  way it is always the same, always has the same effects on the human condition.

Carol Fenlon April 2010

The Collector  by John Fowles.  Jonathon Cape, 1963.

The Collector is a story about the abduction of a young woman, Miranda Grey, by her secret admirer Frederick Clegg and focusses on the relationship that develops between them as he keeps her captive in his cellar.

     I first came across a reference to this novel in the true account Girl In The Cellar: The Natascha Kampusch Story  by Allan Hall and Michael Leidig, published in 2006. Although the novel was published in 1963, 35 years before  Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped, the fictional events Fowles narrates and the descriptive details of Miranda’s imprisonment presage the factual details of Natascha’s story in an eerie way that leads Hall & Leidig to speculate on whether Natascha’s abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil, had in fact read The Collector at some point.

     The narrative is written in two main sections each representing the first person viewpoint of the two protagonists. A third final section in the voice of Clegg, the kidnapper provides the climax to the story.

     The novel opens by introducing us to Frederick Clegg, a rather nondescript council clerk who was brought up by his aunt and whose sole passion is the collecting of butterflies. He has little interest in women as he is only looking for  the perfect specimen who he thinks he has found in Miranda Grey, an art student who he knows only by sight but whom he has worshipped from afar for a long time. The fantasies he entertains about Miranda are tipped into reality when a chance win on the pools means he can indulge his slightest whim. We learn about Miranda along with Clegg as he gets to know her once he has her in his ‘specimen bottle’ and Fowles carefully develops the kidnapper’s realization that he must now look after his prize, that she is not the perfect creature that he hoped for and we observe his painful (and doomed) attempts to turn her into the image of his dreams.

     Similarly we see Clegg from Miranda’s viewpoint in the diary she keeps, how contemptuous she is of his mediocrity, his inability to learn about art and literature and how she learns to manipulate him in order to gain concessions to make her life in her prison more bearable. As her narrative develops she increasingly voices concerns about her artistic talents and her search for the elusive something that will make her painting ‘art’, something more than technical mastery and the influence of past masters.

    There are complex themes at work in this novel. Although it is perhaps mostly famed for its careful exploration of the relationship of captor and captive in a long term relationship, addressing how a semblance of normality can arise as the captive develops attachment to the captor, the emphasis on class differences between Clegg and Miranda, and the contrast between the artistic personality and the uncultured present consistent subtexts within the narrative that point to other themes.

    There is a pre-occupation with class in both characters with Clegg recognizing his own lowly status in respect to Miranda (although somewhat resentfully) despite his new found wealth, and Miranda’s contempt for him, even though this at times turns into efforts to educate him about art, music and literature. To the twenty-first century reader her attitude seems incredibly patronizing and the stark class differentiation appears irrelevant to our time. We must allow however, for the thinking of the 1960s, when education was heralded as the leveller of class, and questions about whether money and /or education can significantly alter the person one was brought up to be, are still valid today.

    The deeper concern with the meaningfulness of art in Miranda’s narrative presented alongside Clegg’s desire for realistic representation and pleasant music is inextricably linked to the class differences between them but Miranda also identifies her parents and fellow art students as being incapable of appreciating true meaning. For me, the fact that the climax of the novel renders all Miranda’s efforts to capture true art  meaningless because of her captor’s actions, points to the murder of art by mass culture and self-interest as the main theme of the text.

     Nevertheless the book is a joy to read on several levels, permitting multiple interpretations. I was left with many questions. How does art compare with the desire for perfection? Does art have meaning when it can so easily be destroyed, either by the jackboot or by the insistent dilution of popular culture? What is the role of education and money in the business/busyness of art? Can there be art without freedom? These are questions that remain as relevant today as when the novel was written in the early ‘sixties and that make The Collector an important and thought provoking book.

Carol Fenlon

March 2010

      

    

2.  The Outcast by Sadie Jones, Chatto & Windus 2008.

 

 It is difficult to believe that this is Sadie Jones’s first novel, so assured is her style, so convincing are the voices.

 

     Using the 1950s as her setting, Jones exactly captures the stiff upper lip mentality of the middle class that still lingered into the post-war period, where nobody really says what they mean and nasty things are swept under the carpet to be covered with a veneer of polite conversation.

 

     The story begins in 1945 when 7 year old Lewis is introduced to the father he has never really known, the father who returns from a prolonged absence at war. Lewis has been used to a close relationship with his mother and the strict father-son rituals enforced as his father takes control of the household, turn Lewis back to the love he is accustomed to share with his mother, and to the games with his friends, the other local children, including his neighbours, Kit and Tamsin Carmichael.

 

     When a tragic accident deprives Lewis of his mother, he is cut off from any emotional contact. His father is unable to soften towards him and is cut off in his own misery at losing his wife. His child pals feel awkward and unable to talk about what happened, and Lewis is sheltered and excluded from any discussion about his mother’s death. Jones effortlessly draws for us the viewpoint of the child who is bewildered by the behaviour of adults and is powerless to understand or influence events going on around him.

 

     Packed off to boarding school, Lewis retreats into numbness and becomes increasingly estranged from the world around him. His fate is sealed with the advent of his father’s new wife, who although kindly enough, knows nothing of children or the devastation Lewis feels and soon gives up her attempts to break down the walls Lewis builds around himself.

 

     Lewis’s alienation goes unmentioned in the community although everyone is aware that something is wrong with him. There is an undercurrent of uneasy whispers about Lewis’s demeanour, his aggressive outbursts, yet there are other undercurrents too, alcohol abuse is rife, yet accepted as long as it is contained within the bounds of acceptable behaviour and there is domestic violence, but this too must be covered up and contained within the family setting, so that the appearance of normality is preserved.

 

     By the time Lewis is twelve he is emotionally desperate. He resorts to self harm in order feel something and the fear this generates in him leads him to alcohol abuse in order to forget the need to feel. Jones’s narrative traces this journey from damaged child to self-destructive adult with a cutting poignancy that never once slips into pity. Her terse prose reflects the harsh reality of dysfunctional family life.

 

    Although Lewis has become the town scapegoat and eventually commits real crimes for which he must be imprisoned, it is the people around him, with whom he has grown up, who have created the abnormal creature that he has become, Locked in their rigid attitudes and behaviours they cannot do otherwise and have no idea of their culpability. Even Lewis’s own father, tries to do his best for the boy, loves him in his own way, yet is totally unable to show his love, the one thing that Lewis really needs.

 

     Jones tells a terrible story, clearly and concisely,without authorial judgement but implicit in the text is the suggestion that once damaged, it is virtually impossible for the child to recover, without some exceptional demonstration of love. All through the book there are moments when the reader hopes that this will happen, where love might blossom and save Lewis, yet Lewis’s alienation means that he has unwittingly created a persona for himself that only a superhuman person could love unconditionally.

 

     We might look at this novel as describing attitudes from the past, the furtive upstairs- downstairs, double standards of the middle classes that still clung through the 1950s, only being swept away in the freedoms of the swinging 60s, yet self harm and mental health problems, domestic violence, child abuse and alcoholism are still with us today with the added refinements of drug addiction, knife and gun culture and teenage gangs who terrorise their neighbourhoods. This makes the issues raised in The Outcast crucially topical for readers today.

 

Carol Fenlon

January 2010