Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Susan Hill
Chatto and Windus 2008
May and her brothers and sisters grow up in a bleak farmhouse called The Beacon. All except May get away. Frank, the silent child, gets further than the rest, becoming a successful journalist and the author of a popular “misery memoir” about his childhood. The trouble is, it’s not true – or at least not as he tells it. Susan Hill’s latest is a slim novella, but it packs more in than many much longer works, and leaves a long-lasting impression. It’s a story told with a clarity that belies its final ambiguity. In fact, I think it deserves a second reading. Perhaps then the reasons for May’s breakdown during her year at university in London and what actually happened in the cupboard under the stairs – if anything – will become clearer. If so, I will add something to this review. In the meantime, this is a very fine novella that conjures up a whole world in its few pages, exploring the unreliability of memory and the sometimes malign pressure families can exert with a quiet, confident authority. Highly recommended.
18th January 2009
I rarely read anything twice (so many books, so little time) but The Beacon preyed on my mind so much that I had to. I think that’s a recommendation in itself. Certainly second time around, things became a lot clearer.
WARNING: PLOT SPOILER FOLLOWS.
I don’t think there was any physical cruelty, but the pressure Bertha Prime, her mother, puts on May not to leave the farm is emotional cruelty of a similar kind. A product of her own mental instability (after losing two babies her thoughts turn to suicide and her later apathy is surely the mark of a depressive), it is accentuated by family pressures of her own. Thus misery is passed on from generation to generation – genetically and emotionally – and, after her brief time away in London also ends in a breakdown, May is condemned to remain at The Beacon. Bertha wants to control her daughter’s life, and in the end does, even after her own death – which May hoped would bring her freedom – through a will which, by leaving her nothing else but the right to live there, binds her daughter to the farm. As Susan Hill writes, “memory is random”, and May never sees it quite like that. However, by the end Frank does - and uses it as a justification for his account of fictionalised miseries.
The problem with the Prime family is that so much that is true is left unsaid. May cherishes the few words of love she gets from her father, and exchanges only trivialities with her mother. Frank as a child says nothing, and when as an adult he says more, it is made up. In the end it is difficult to distinguish the truth from the lies and, just as families come to believe in their own myths, Frank comes to believe his own fiction too.
The clarity of its writing and its brevity belie this thought-provoking novel’s complexity and its depth and I recommend it even more highly this time round.
26th January 2009
http://www.susan-hill.com/
See also: The Small Hand
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