And now for an interlude of light fiction...

[N.B. Please forgive the erratic text formatting. I wrote this post in Word and tried to transfer it to Typepad with bizarre unfixable results.]

I’ve sat a good 10 minutes thinking about how to start my review of Fiona Robyn’s debut novel, The Letters.  My difficulty, I think, stems from an inability to neatly categorise it. It looks like one thing, and is partly another.  The cover has the flavour of ‘women’s fiction’ about it, if not exactly ‘chick lit’; and the blurb appears to confirm that with its opening salvo: ‘Violet Ackerman has drifted through a career, four children and a divorce without know who she is or what she wants.’  But it comes from Snowbooks, a small press I admire for their publishing acumen.  They have a knack, I think, for spotting books that are highly saleable –  that look like chick lit or thrillers or historical romance – but which deliver something much more under cover of populism.   Thus The Letters looks like the saga of a mid-life love affair (and will probably sell best to women over forty), but turns out to be more a four-part harmony about parenthood, sexuality, village life and psychological breakdown. I'm not ashamed to say that I read it compulsively with great relish and enjoyment.

What the blurb says is true:  Violet Ackerman, now aged 51, has indeed drifted through a career, four children (now all in their 20s) and a divorce.  She has moved to the coast – to the village of Abbotsfield – and she is a member of the eccentric Village Committee.  No doubt at all that her relationship with her lover is turbulent.   But here the selling cliché ends.   For example, Abbotsfield is not the picture postcard village of our imaginations:

... it wasn’t picturesque in the slightest.  A few of the houses were covered in that nasty grey lumpy stuff like porridge, and there weren’t any tearooms, just a Post Office that was ‘closed for lunch’.

And the Village Committee isn’t composed of flowery ‘ladies who lunch’ and retired military gentleman, as you might picture it from an episode of Midsomer Murders.   Instead there is Will, a young businessman on the verge of his second nervous breakdown; Angie and Sue, inimitable enemies fuming at each other across the Minutes; Rob, who lives alone in his miniature flat; Peggy, whose housekeeping leaves much to be desired; and Margaret, who strives for professionalism in the face of such rank disorder.  And Violet. 

Violet lacks something in the way of social skills.  She admits this to herself quite candidly:

She’d never been natural at developing connections.  Other people seemed to find it so easy.  She sometimes imagined them as having lots of different coloured strings attached to their bodies, representing the things about themselves that other people would find attractive or interesting.  All they had to do was take the end of one of these strings and offer it to a passing stranger, and the stranger seemed willing to take it and become a friend.  It didn’t seem to matter what it was – a mutual interest in showing Persians, the perfect recipe for asparagus soufflé, even a common fascination with the weather over the next few days.  She saw it happening all around her, half of her scoffing at the inanity of the exchanges, and the other half a tiny bit jealous.

She has spent her life devoted to her work – as a structural engineer – and fails to see why she should pander to other people’s emotions or fancies.  She is blunt and says exactly what she thinks, often without considering the consequences; when she is angry, she flings words about like anvils.  She is completely at a loss in the face of others’ distress, and is more likely to laugh, or instruct someone to ‘pull themselves together’, than to offer a shoulder to cry on.  Her own children tiptoe around her, afraid to tell her about their life plans in case she derides and ridicules them.  In this she is unconsciously like her own mother, with whom she has a frosty, critical relationship.  Her difficult affair with her partner arises out of her inability to connect with her emotions, or admit her own failings.  Despite all this, Violet is an intensely likeable woman: forthright, determined, unabashed and, underneath it all, very loving.  It is not difficult to understand why her children keep turning back to her; or why her lover always wants to give her just one more chance.  She is disconnected rather than cruel. 

The letters of the title, which punctuate the novel at intervals, start to drop through Violet’s letterbox at a particularly difficult time.  Her son, Guy, has moved in with her after yet another unsuccessful attempt at a career; she has split up with her partner; and the Village Committee is in vitriolic meltdown.  They are addressed to her, but appear to have no bearing on her life.  Originally sent in 1959, they are written by Elizabeth, a young woman in a Mother and Baby home, to her best friend Beatrice.  They are a confession of pre-marital sex and interracial love, and articulate Elizabeth’s attempt to negotiate her intuitive feelings with the strict mores of the society of which she is a part.   They strike a chord with Violet, partly because she is as compelled by a bittersweet narrative as anyone else, and partly because they disturb her.  She is convinced they have nothing to do with her, and yet there is something hauntingly and perceptibly familiar about them. 

Familiarity and alienation are twin moons orbiting character and plot in The Letters.  Everything about the immediate synopsis of Violet’s life is utterly familiar and safe; but the letters, the vulnerable neighbours, the cacophonous children are all alien, even uncanny.  Violet experiences herself as part way between these two states – synonymous with normality and abnormality, I suppose – which are almost akin to two worlds.  This is the source of the novels cleverness, because it is the root of its subtlety.  It means that Violet’s mundane, almost clichéd existence is tempered with a weirdness; not an unsettling weirdness but a weirdness that successfully replicates the human experience of feeling simultaneously ordinary/one-of-many and extraordinary/unique.  Couple this with Robyn’s ability to replicate (and parody) the behaviours of this generation of parents and adult children very well (I recognise my own mother, and myself), and you have a highly successful piece of popular fiction.

This is not to claim that The Letters is a literary or philosophical novel, nor an existential masterpiece.  But it is very good at being what it is: articulate, well-observed, tightly plotted, sweet and funny.  It is certainly on a pedestal above similarly jacketed books on 3 for 2 tables.

~~Victoria~~

Comments

[Maisie]

I've just finished reading The Letters too and found it just as you say- a well written book very readable, enjoyable and such an interesting plot that it was hard to put down. It is a difficult book to categorise as to say too much in the blurb would ruin the plot that Fiona Robyn so brilliantly manipulates- I loved it all- cover included!

[fiona robyn]

Thank you, Victoria, for such a thoughtful and well written review. What a privelige.

And I'm so glad you enjoyed it, Maisie!

Cover design has been an ongoing subject of debate over at the Snowblog (http://www.snowbooks.com/weblog/) - it can be a tricky one!

[sowr]

Thank you Victoria, your review is very nice.
thank you again.