Number 79 - Small Pleasures - Clare Chambers

 

This month's book group book - I will admit I would never have picked this up of my own volition.

There's always a danger in giving a book a title like Small Pleasures.  It leaves the door open to so many possible attacks from reviewers if they don't like it.  

However it also opens to "This was no small pleasure" types of reviews. Indeed this book opens with 10 full pages of glowing reviews of that sort. I can't remember the last time I saw so many at the start of the book.*

Anyhoo.. what did I think of it?

This is definitely another book that's out of my  normal genre choices.

In the 1950s, a single 40 year old female reporter at a local paper is tasked with looking into an alleged virgin birth.  Her relationship with the family of the "miracle" child leads to the possibility of escape from the drudgery of her home life.

This isn't a book of overplayed, highly strung emotion.  Jean is emotionally repressed, still living at home caring for her elderly mother.  Her relationship builds slowly and steadily. Most of the drama is kept off screen and everything seems very cozy. The only high passion relationship that develops is kept off screen and revealed not to be all it was hoped for.

The language used throughout the book is very restrained and somewhat dated.  However, this serves to cement the 50's setting with remarkable accuracy.  This being a modern novel though, there are other themes present and Jean's attitudes do seem to be a few decades out of their time.

By and large she's a sympathetic creation.  We have full sympathy for her drudgery and the tedium of looking after her elderly mother.  The glimpse into her possible future when she goes on holiday is probably the least subtle moment in the book

Near the end of the book though, I almost started to feel that Chambers was just piling misery on poor Jean for the sake of it. How many ways can you throw hope at a character and then grab it back?  The ending is a gut punch, but one that the attentive reader might guess from the opening chapters.

It held my interest throughout. I did actually feel sorry for Jean at times. The tedium is maybe too realistically portrayed. I kicked myself for not being quite attentive enough to realise the relevance of the opening of the book until the end.

I'm not sure I'll read another Clare Chambers again in a hurry, but this does what it sets out to do and provides more than small pleasure on the way.  

*Actually I believe my copy of the Wasp Factory has a similar number of reviews before the book starts.  However, it hilariously includes as many bad reviews as good, and the bad reviews it lists are full of hatred. It was one of the things that made me read the book - the fact that it inspired as much hate as love.  For the record I loved it.