Girl, Woman, Other

Girl, Woman, Other – Bernadine Evaristo

I had been eager to read this for a while, the novel that won the latest Booker Prize (along with Margaret Atwood – a controversial move by the judges), having heard Evaristo speak at the Cheltenham Literary festival. It did not disappoint.

The novel is not so much plot-driven but more of a collection of short stories about (mostly) black British women of different ages and stages of life, from different social classes and backgrounds. Some she touches on briefly, others are given detailed life accounts, but their lives are all connected. Some connections do not become clear straight away and I found it enjoyable to discover the links between them.

There is Bummi, the cleaner with a Maths degree from Nigeria, whose daughter Carole goes to study Maths at Cambridge; Shirley, a teacher at Carole’s school who tries to improve the life chances of talented pupils; Amma, a theatre director and an old friend of Shirley’s; Amma’s daughter, Yazz, a 19-year-old student; non-binary Morgan, who Yazz hears speak at university … the list goes on. There are twelve central characters, some more likeable than others. The set of supporting male characters, however, are almost entirely unlikeable.

These women are mostly radical in some way, but different generations have different perceptions of what radical is. Amma, a feminist lesbian, amusingly is told by her daughter, “feminism is so herd-like […] to be honest, even being a woman is passé these days”. Yazz herself forms a clique at university within which they almost argue over who is the most oppressed, leading to a conversation about the “relative and contextual nature of privilege […] is Obama less privileged than a white hillbilly growing up in a trailer park with a junkie single mother and a jailbird father?”

As well as thought-provoking, I found the book laugh out loud funny at times. For example, when Dominique’s controlling new girlfriend makes a speech about “the racial implications” of various commonplace black items, declaring, “I never wear black underpants, for example, why crap on myself?” and Amma responds, “that’s not a problem for me […] because guess what, I’ve not crapped my pants since I stopped wearing nappies as a kid”. Race and identity are serious themes that occur one way or another in all of their lives but are usually dealt with in a light-hearted way.

As powerful novels usually are, it was also very moving at times. I particularly felt for Bummi in her loneliness after her daughter left home and for LaTishna, a young single mother, who seemed to keep ending up with the wrong man. However, the reader cannot delve deeply into all of their lives and perhaps it would have been a greater novel if there were fewer characters covered in more depth.

The writing felt friendly and conversational. Although not written in first person, the different sections seem to take on slightly different styles in line with the change in perspective. At first I was put off by the lack of full-stops (isn’t that a bit pretentious, trying too hard to be alternative?) but I stopped noticing after a while, after becoming absorbed in the characters’ lives, and the narrative flowed well with the line breaks. It seemed, at times, more like poetry than prose.

The ending, was slightly unsatisfactory though (as endings often are). To me it felt unnecessary and a bit too neat to have the majority of characters end up in the same place at the same time (at the opening night of Amma’s play), although it did bring resolution to some loose ends. For example, although they share an awkward conversation, Shirley (or Mrs King) finally gets the thanks she has been waiting for from Carole; and Dominque and Amma (old friends, now living continents apart) are briefly reunited.

All in all, this is well worth a read. A beautiful and fun novel, following these women through their successes and their struggles as they negotiate lives normally underrepresented in fiction.

The First Time Lauren Pailing Died

The First Time Lauren Pailing Died – Alyson Rudd

Having always been fascinated with books about time travel and parallel universes, and upon recommendation, I decided to give this 2019 release a go. The First Time Lauren Pailing Died was a good read; I found it hard to put down.

Lauren lives with her mother, Vera, and her father, Bob, in Cheshire in an ordinary suburb. However, her life is far from ordinary. At a young age, she realises that she is different from other children, “where her classmates had imagination, she had something more tangible”, because she is able to glimpse alternatives through shafts of light. When her mother takes her to the Optician, he declares there is nothing wrong with her vision but notices that “it was as if she could see through him, see him for what he really was”.

Based on a theory in quantum mechanics that until measurement an atom can be in two quantum states, Rudd plays on the idea that there is a possibility of being alive in one world and dead in another. Each time Lauren dies, another perspective is added in, showing how the other characters’ lives go on without her, a unique way of telling a story.

The style of Rudd’s prose is very simple without much description. This matter-of-fact nature, along with the short chapters made the book feel very pacey and plot driven, however, it was not only about the plot. The novel is very moving at times and there is a beauty in the simplicity. For example, when Lauren dies for the first time, “She knew without thinking without calculating, the way that she knew her name and she knew that ice was cold, that she had died”.

Rudd tells the story from multiple points of view but does not write in first person so the reader never quite gets as close to the characters as you might expect. Some are unconvincing but I found that I did build a connection with the eponymous Lauren and her husband Tim – and was moved the most when she departed this version of her life. In her second life, Lauren notices things missing as “the wisp of smoke from the corner of a distant dream”. However, in her third life, there is a profound sense of being trapped and whilst she is not unhappy, she is aware of a loss that she is unable to mourn or fully account for: “it seemed to Lauren that in this world there was less, not more, of everything. It was a world with less energy, less sparkle. It was a world with flat light and repetitive sunsets”. It is not only her world and the people around her that have changed, but she herself is different and at one point, even looks out for her counterpart, “Lauren looked over her shoulder and too late realised she was looking for herself”. She does see a therapist and eventually discuss her sense of reality with her husband, but for the most part, Lauren is alone in this “knowing”, giving a great sadness to this part of the narrative.

Alongside the story of Lauren Pailing, is the story of Peter Stanning, Bob’s boss, who mysteriously disappears in each of her lives. Lauren becomes fascinated with his disappearance, uses it to inspire her art, and tells his son not to give up looking. Throughout the novel, Peter’s wife and sons are left in limbo, which seems perhaps the worst form of loss: “It made [George] almost envy Bob and his catalogue of real, tangible disasters”. Whilst the truth is eventually discovered, its futility does not bring any sense of resolution.

Rudd also makes references to the way in which time is uncontrollable. She compares Lauren’s life more than once to a conveyor belt, and her father contemplates, for example, “the way time would slip from his grasp, that he could look at his watch and find that he had lost an hour, maybe several, and that this was wasteful or at least it would be if there was not part of him that willed away the hours”. Readers can identify with a sense of time running away from them and at other times painfully slowing down, which I think renders the novel more convincing; small details have changed, but the worlds Lauren occupies are similar to our own. The style of writing also seems to lend itself to the notion of time moving on irrepressibly.

Whilst the novel started off well, I did find the ending a bit contrived and some of the characters lacked depth. Perhaps not as sophisticated as some other books of a similar theme, I enjoyed reading The First Time Lauren Pailing Died. I liked the simplistic style, the sense of inevitability, the way ordinary lives turned extraordinary through Lauren’s deaths and the way that Peter Stanning’s death was explained but understated just because “it was his time.”