Breakfast At Libraries: December 2014

Monday, 29 December 2014

The Visitors by Simon Sylvester

The Visitors by Simon Sylvester won the Guardian’s reader-voted ‘Not The Booker’ prize in 2014, despite this mixed review. The review describes it as being set in ‘the Shetlands’ – but in fact, the narrator never specifies the location of Bancree, the fictional Scottish island on which the novel is set, and the references to Gaelic nursery rhymes and place names are more suggestive of the Western Isles than Shetland or Orkney. Either way, anyone who has ever spent time visiting any of these islands, as I have, will immediately recognise the unique of combination of beauty and peace with bleakness and isolation that Simon Sylvester skilfully evokes in The Visitors. Bancree itself, and the sea that surrounds it, are almost characters in their own right, and the setting of the story is one of its greatest strengths.

The girls’ intense friendship is formed amid a backdrop of mystery and unease. A number of disappearances, including that of a close friend of Flora’s family, have occurred, and Ailsa’s father is obsessed with the notion that they could be linked to the disappearance of his wife shortly after Ailsa was born. Flora, meanwhile, finds herself ever more caught up in researching the myths of the selkies, mysterious, capricious hybrids of humans and seals said to swim off the Scottish coast. The selkie stories are many and varied, but all have in common the central theme of destructive, obsessive love, characterised by entrapment and imprisonment.

The novel begins at a calm, thoughtful pace, like a rare summer day in the Hebrides, and then accelerates like a thriller towards the end in the manner of a sudden island storm. I didn’t find the change in pace jarring, exactly, but the sudden burst of physical action in what is up to this point a relatively contemplative, wistful sort of read does come as something of a surprise. Sylvester doesn’t take an easy route with his ending – there’s a strong sense of ambiguity, as well as a deep undercurrent of sadness – but it feels like the right conclusion, nevertheless.

There were times during The Visitors when I felt that the characterisation wasn’t entirely convincing. The boorish, womanising heir to the local distillery business felt a little overblown to me and Flora’s exuberant Danish ‘uncle’ Anders was edging towards caricature. I did, however, feel that Flora herself was, if not convincing as a typical teenage girl, then absolutely convincing as the atypical outsider that she is, and will always be.

The Visitors is a quietly unsettling novel which combines psychogeography, folklore and a coming of age narrative with certain elements of the traditional crime thriller. I’m delighted, and not at all surprised, that Guardian readers chose it to win the Not The Booker competition: it’s a book that deserves more attention and that I suspect I’ll find myself thinking about for a long time.

Sunday, 7 December 2014

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Everything I Never Told You is Celeste Ng's first novel, and it's an exceptionally accomplished one. Set in 1970s Ohio and beginning with the disappearance and death of Lydia, the teenage middle child in the mixed race Lee family, Everything I Never Told You is a delicately crafted story of the expectations and regrets of parents and children, about being different and wanting to fit in, and about fitting in and wanting to be different.

The story is partly told in flashback and partly in the present during the aftermath of Lydia's death, from the points of view of each family member, including Lydia herself. Lydia, it's acknowledged by her siblings Nathan and Hannah, is their parents' favourite, and as such, has become a sort of conduit through which both her father and mother are determined to see their own regrets and mistakes put right. It's essential for James, her Chinese-American father, that she will fit in, have friends, be accepted socially in a way he never has been. Marilyn, her white mother - disowned by her own mother in turn for choosing a Chinese husband - is desperate for Lydia to fulfil her own thwarted dreams of becoming a doctor, rejecting the path of marriage and children that is still traditional in the novel's 1970s setting.

I have seen Everything I Never Told You described as a literary thriller, but I wouldn't really classify it as that. It's true that Lydia was last seen before her mysterious disappearance with Jack Wolff, well-known as the local bad boy, and that Nathan is convinced this must be significant, but the actual explanation of Lydia's death is secondary to the sensitively-written exploration of the Lee family's troubled states of mind. Objects acquire deep significance, symbolising the family's unspoken resentments and anxieties: an all-American Betty Crocker Cookbook, for instance, or a broken locket. Hannah's room is full of small belongings stolen and hidden from the rest of the family, as if she - almost entirely ignored - has become the curator of their repressed concerns. Lydia's shelves are full of diaries, and yet when they are opened in the days following her death, they prove to be completely blank. Not only can the Lee family not be open with each each other, it seems that they can't even bear to be honest with themselves.

Everything I Never Told You is an understated, quiet sort of novel, primarily introspective. Tensions are buried and resentment unexpressed - none of the Lees ever seem able to confront each other, and neither do they ever seem to confront anyone for the constant racism they face, at school, at work, on holiday. I found this book almost painfully sad at times - yet there is, as it draws to a conclusion, a sense of hope for the future that comes as something of a relief.