Two of my most recent reads turned out to have more in common than I expected when I picked them up.
75 The Language of Birds, Jill Dawson
Two girls, Mandy and Rosy, meet in a psychiatric hospital in rural Norfolk. They become friends and, when they leave hospital, make a plan to go to London together. Rosy, a fierce girl whose hospital stay related to hearing voices and an attempt at suicide, is a Norland nanny - she secures a position for herself and recommends Mandy friends of her aristocratic employer.
Soon Mandy is working for Lady Morven, and the young women find themselves being pulled into the fierce custody battle between Mandy's employer and her estranged husband. Lady Morven is convinced that her husband has a violent streak but he is determined to convince everyone that she is unstable and unreliable.
This is a strange, dreamy book. It took me quite a long time to realise that it is a fictionalised version of the story of Sandra Rivett, the nanny to Lord Lucan's children, who was murdered the night that he disappeared (almost certainly by him, having been mistaken in the dark house for his ex-wife). Seeing how unenthusiastic I am about fictional books about real people, I seem to keep picking them up.
The question for me was, did changing Sandra's name and some of the details of her life make it OK to write a made up story about what happened to her in the months leading up to her death? For me I'd say no. I appreciate what Dawson was trying to do (she writes in her afterword about trying to give recognition and a voice to someone who, because of class and gender and the sensationalised reaction of the press, was barely recognised as a victim) but it still feels like distasteful ventriloquism, despite the name change: giving someone words and thoughts and actions that they did not have in real life.
76 Heroes of the Frontier, Dave Eggers
Josie is running away, from her relationship breakdown, from the loss of her business and reputation , and from the death of a family friend, for which she holds herself responsible. At the opening of the book, she arrives in Alaska with her young children, rents an ancient RV and hits the road with a vague plan to meet up with her step-sister (although step-sister isn't quite accurate - it's complicated).
This is dark comedy slash state of the nation, which I think (from what I can remember) is Eggers' wheelhouse. Josie is incredibly irritating (sher's one of those fictional mothers who spends ALL her time feeling sorry for herself because being a mother is just so HARD, ugh) but Eggers isn't an idiot, and gradually you come to see how she's ended up in such a mess.
I like this because I like the idea of running away to Alaska in a RV. A lot. Also, it's funny. Here is Josie's ex-partner, the cocklodger son of wealthy parents, convincing himself into performative depression over the Occupy Wall Street protests:
All those months of Occupy were disastrous. He was paralyzed. She found him in bed, lying on his back, on their capitalist mattress, a towel on his face. She found him on the floor of the children's room, splayed like he'd called into a ditch.....He called off the renovations, sent the workers away, leaving the house full of plastic sheeting, billowing loudly from the open windows.
"Now these guys don't get paid," Josie said. "Don't they need work, too?"
"That's not the point," he said, but his eyes showed some recognition that it might be part of the point. Carl had never been one to see the connection between any of his own actions and the running of the finances of their household or town or world.
How did we get so far away from everything?" he asked, and Josie realized he really meant this. He had somehow come to confuse himself with some Weather Underground revolutionary who had lately gone soft. Josie couldn't conjure anything vaguely revolutionary that Carl had ever done. She knew he'd once voted for the Green Party. Maybe that was it. Now he pined for his Occupy brethren as if Josie had personally come to steal him away from his place at the barricades.
77 A Perfect Explanation, Eleanor Anstruther
What irritated Finetta about her mother was not the lack of love but the obvious hatred.
This book opens with Finetta planning to visit her mother in a nursing home. She's a regular visitor, but this time there's something different - Finetta is bringing Ian. Ian, it seems, is Enid's son, but is he? "I don't have any sons", Enid tells the nurses, distressed and panicking as she tries to reach her daughter to cancel the visit.
The twisty and dark story of the history between these people is slowly teased out throughout the book. And I found it gripping - it's rather like a Barbara Vine in its gothic atmosphere of secrets, resentment and barely suppressed madness.
What took me completely by surprise, at the end of the book, was to find that the fact that some of the characters are surnamed Anstruther is not just a quirky authorial choice, but that this is in fact the true story (as true as Anstruther has been able to, or chosen to, make it) of the author's father and his family.
WHY SO MANY FICTIONALISED ACCOUNTS OF REAL PEOPLE? Why, God, why? I really liked this but I need to find more stories that are made up, or at least made up enough that you can't tell who they are supposed to be about.
PS thank you to whoever it was that posted a review of Fallout by the same author - looking for a copy of that led me to this, and I look forward to reading it when I get the chance.