From that statement (and my review of Aphra's Child last year) you might deduce that I am a fan of lesley Glaister's writing. This is her newest book, released this week by Sandstone Press. It will be available through all good online booksellers since we can't get out to a traditional bookshop yet - but if you go direct to their website, they have no commission to pay.
From the back cover, this book sounds like a story of a doomed romance in post First World War Britain. I disagree with that. it's a much darker story. It's a difficult book to categorise, flirting as it does with a number of genres. there are hints of psychological thriller, a crime story of sorts, a passing wave of the hand at a love story, but between which characters?
Told in Glaister's traditional smooth and elegant prose, this is the story of Clementine, a nurse in WWI who loses her love on the front lines and settles for a staid marriage to a middle class doctor back home. Her life is turned upside down when she has a chance encounter with Vince, a war veteran with half a face. He lives above a bar in a nearby town and is smitten with his landlady, but he'll take whatever he can get from poor Clem.
As I said at the top of this review, I have read Lesley Glaister's entire output. Unlike any other writer where I've read more than 10 of their books, I still have no idea where the story is going or the path she's going to take me on to get there. 50 pages from the end of this and I had no idea how the story was going to wrap up.
The 1920's setting is immaculately done. At no point do any of the character's actions or dialogue feel even slightly anachronistic. Clem is a remarkably well drawn character. Her helplessness at being trapped in a marriage that doesn't interest her shines off the page. Vince is a thoroughly dislikeable but strangely sympathetic creation too. His manipulation of Clementine is thoroughly creepy and nasty, but do his motivations offer him redemption?
A nice touch is the switch from past tense to present tense depending on which of the two characters is the focus of the chapter. Their first couple of meetings are actually told twice, once from her perspective and again from his. That she manages this without seeming repetitive is truly remarkable. The differing viewpoints serve to ratchet the tension to perfection.
One of the joys of a Glaister novel is that the reader is left to make these decisions for themselves. there's no preaching or moralising, just a clinical deconstruction of cause and effect. Clues can be scattered early in the narrative and it's up to the reader to determine why things happen later on.
(sidebar here - when I first read Trick or Treat many years ago, the ending seemed a little strange. But at 3 o'clock in the morning, my mind suddenly put together the reasons why what happened at the end happened. The two keys to the end of that book had been mentioned in passing about 50 pages in and 90 pages in and never mentioned again. My piecing together of that particular jigsaw gave the whole book an entire new meaning.)
As any regular readers of this blog know, I am a sucker for a good punny title, and this is a great one, referring as it does to both the two central characters and the events surrounding them.
I've raced through this novel in just a couple of days. She is one of the easiest and most effortless authors I know of. That's even more remarkable when she can hide so many layers of narrative in prose as lucid and clear as she writes.
this is an easy contender for book of the year. Emotional without being mawkish, funny in places, and a real sense of tension in others. In the hands of a lesser writer, this story could have been melodramatic nonsense. In the hands of Lesley Glaister, it's an elegant and moving portrayal of two very damaged people.
Easily 9/10 from me, maybe higher.
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