I really enjoyed this - it has lots of elements I enjoy, packed together in one book: therapy and its jargon; how New Ageiness can cross into sounding like therapy but not being therapy; relationships between characters that are layered with broken dynamics, resentments real or imagined, and expectations galore; possible unreliable narrators; lots of immersion in the characters mindsets...and more!
One of the reviewers on the back cover said the protagonist was 'flawed' but we 'can't help rooting for' her. The oddest thing about the protagonist Rachel, is that she's so normal! Not book middle class normal - but real life 'don't know who the hell I am and lie quite a bit as a result' normal. The sort of casual lying we all do here and there for self protection, or to grease the wheels of conversation, or to bond with a stranger: faces we wear. Rachel is a more extreme example but I can see where it all comes from; and as a narrator, she's very honest about her lying, you know when she's doing it - it makes her a reliable witness. In many ways she's so wonderfully open and almost desperate for connection and a sense of worth that she lies to herself, knowingly, to keep connections even when she knows they are all wrong for her, hurting her. I sympathised with and understood her, so many elements of me in there (hence I think she's 'normal'; I think we all lie about how much or often we lie in social situations (see my review of Fake Accounts here too), so Rachel was refreshing and true.
The other two main characters are Lily and Amber. Lily is Rachel's mother and the focus of her anger and desperately thwarted love (and vice versa). All she wants is a normal relationship, yet she has to choreograph each and every meeting and moment, to try and keep things even with Lily. Lily is a powerfully scary creation: someone who is so certain of herself and her right to control her children's (whole family's really) lives, she just goes right ahead and does so, with a mixture of passive aggressive "weaponised" conversations, twisting words and feelings to suit what she wants to happen and for them to feel; and outright hostility, toward the end. It's her undoing.
Amber is the therapist Lily finds for Rachel to help with her drink and drugs problems (is there an echo of Marian Keyes' Rachel of Rachel's Holiday here? The way Rachel in that book thought she was living one life and its not till later we see she's living quite another more tawdry drink and drug filled one). Amber is very expensive, very exclusive, and is a wonderful mixture of confidante, best friend, Catholic confessor (- the sort we all might of wished we had while reading the Susan Howatch Glittering Images series long ago, a Father Darrow figure), New Age guru and cult leader. She's hypnotic, you feel yourself falling for the intensity even as we see her leading the questions and turning the conversations with Rachel exactly where she wants them to go while bolstering Rachel with all the things she wished had been said to her, all the boundaries broken she wished she could have had with 'normal' family relationships, deep and satisfying.
(Moment while I ehem, as I haven't experienced anything like that in real life, but people write it so often, you assume either we are daydreaming our way to the better family lives we all crave, or someone out there has them and we are ever increasingly whispering these tales of betterness to each other and living vicariously through them...I don't know.)
Of course, Amber is more than she seems. The other main characters in the book are mostly female (nice, I like that) - Esther, a once upon a time teenage nanny to Rachel's sister Sophie, who is also not what she seems; and Sophie herself who who is adoreable and honest and ordinary in a way that Rachel is both frustrated by and protective of. The remaining male characters of the main ensemble are Nick, Rachel and Sophie's father - a bull and a bully with swagger and money, who is nevertheless protected by his wife from life (whether he asked for that to be the case or not); and Rachel's brother Josh, in many ways a MiniMe of the father and also a bully.
It's a wonderful exploring of the roles we get assigned in families - you are the black sheep, you are the dutiful daughter, you are the long suffering mother, you are the provider father etc - and there's a scene about halfway through the book at a retreat where Amber plays with these sorts of names for her clients during a very hippyish and almost Laing-like rebirthing scene, where the clients see 'past lives'. What the past lives appear to be is metaphoric realignings with how they see the relationships with the most problematic family member in their lives: Marco (another client at the retreat) sees his inappropriate and over fun-loving father as a soldier with him in a previous life, where they were best friends, and that the soldier-friend then died, causing Marco a terrible feeling of not having looked after him, that covers his feelings toward his father in this life: a man who behaves like a naughty uncle or friend instead of a father, causing Marco to beleive he must always look after him instead of the other way around - leading Marco to a sort of permanent adolescence, stuck needing a father but being a caretaker. When Rachel has her experience, its anything but ecstatic and illuminating; instead it's terrifying, but tells a truth about how she perceives her mother. Note: I'm definately a hippywitchy type and I do regard past lives (it's one of my notions) as possible; and yet I loved the reason for these probably very false ones. It made perfect sense, with Amber's need to control her clients and their emotion flow toward others and especially toward her; and therapeutically, it seemed to help the others (a convoluted placebo; a reframing of a narrative).
I won't spoiler where the story goes - just to say that I very much enjoyed the interplay of these characters and I could not put the book down - this was a read till 3 a.m. and sod the consequences book for me.
Lastly, it's a book about addictions and how we swap drugs and substances for behaviours (self destructive usually) and sometimes people. Sometimes an unholy mix of all of those. It all rang true - expressed psychologically and pop psychologically; I even bought in to the hippiest of New Agey talk from Amber, because I could really see how it applied to Rachel; sometimes vague and lacking meaning when you examined the sentences spoken, sometimes simple and profound, like finding something you'd lost a while ago and being happy and surpised to see it again.
I don't know if Kate Ruby's subsequent books can be as absorbing and true to its characters as this one, but I really really hope so! Do I need to say this is recommended?? :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment