Review: He Said/She Said by Erin Kelly

Rating 3/5

(An average of 1/5 for the first two thirds of the book, 4/5 for the last third)

Warning: This post will contain BIG SPOILERS, so if you don’t want to find them out please stop here. Also be advised that this book covers a rape trial, and the issues of consent and emotional manipulation/abuse, so if you find any of these themes distressing you may also wish to stop here.

I thought I knew where this book was going. So much so that I didn’t want to attend this month’s meeting of Gloucester Book Club to discuss it. In a book that is a good 100 pages too long, the latter third was disturbing enough for me to grab for my chromebook and write about it almost as soon as I was done.

We begin with the He and She of the book’s title, a young couple called Kit and Laura, who exchange narratives across a period of time, from a solar eclipse they both witnessed in 1999, to a present day eclipse, in 2015. Kit is travelling to the Faroe Islands to see this one alone, leaving pregnant wife Laura alone at home in London. Kit is obsessed with solar eclipses, so the couple aim to both see as many as they can throughout the years they spend together, but the narrative event that really ties the two time points together is the Laura and Kit’s interruption of a rape at an eclipse festival in 1999, and its subsequent fallout, which culminates during the solar eclipse weekemd of 2015.

The subject of the assault, Beth, is presented as the ‘mad woman in the attic’, after she follows Kit and Laura to London after her rape trial and starts lingering around their home. We are led to believe that, like Bertha Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Beth Taylor is a wronged woman whose madness and instability ultimately lead to her create a devastating fire that wounds the male hero and destroys his home irrevocably. The difference in He Said/She Said is that Kit scalds his hand on a burning doorknob as he rescues Laura from their burning flat in Clapham Common, and Beth doesn’t jump to her death from the flaming roof…but more on that later.

As a result, Laura led to believe that the woman she once sought to help after a sexual assault now has a crazed vendetta against her, calling into question the very idea that what the couple witnessed at Lizard Point Festival in 1999 was in fact an interrupted rape, and not some part of a damaged woman’s mind games. This is the point of the novel I had reached when I was due to attend my book club meeting, and, as I imagine Laura would be, I am not to be dissuaded from the idea that sexual consent should, and can be, withdrawn at any time and still remain valid, and so was not keen on the idea of discussing a book that took nearly 200 pages to muddy this water.

Before I get on to the turning point of the novel, I just wanted to give kudos to Erin Kelly for her realistic portrayal of Laura’s anxiety attacks. Other than Laura’s initial feeling of her arms being trailed by ‘gossamer’, (which I find far too lovely a description for such a hellish feeling), Kelly’s unflinching references to Laura’s repeated arm scratching, for me, accurately depict not only how visceral the psychosomatic feelings of an anxiety attack can feel, but also how easily self-harm can become a coping strategy for the subject without them even being aware it.

So, to the revelation that changed the book for me…or, if you’ll pardon the pun, eclipsed where I thought the original plot was going. (Come on, I couldn’t not go for that one!)

The fact that Kit (with her consent) slept with Beth the night before she was raped, made her lie about this at her trial, cut his own foot, set fire to his own flat and then hide this all from his wife for the next 15 years, to the detriment of her career, as well as mental and physical health, all to protect himself and his relationship with Laura, continues to astound me more than any of the physical assaults the rapist Jamie carries out in the course of the novel. This isn’t to say that one type of assault is greater than the other, or one type of abuser more valid than the next, but rather how much I am still shocked at how normalised the narrative of female hysteria is, to the point that I didn’t see this twist coming until it was revealed.

For all the advances we have made since the days of Jane Eyre, Kelly’s unsettling story has made me wonder why as a society we still see emotional and psychological abuse as a woman’s domain, the feminised reaction to the comparatively male weapons of physical violence and rape, when in reality, far too many people learn to their detriment that any form of abuse isn’t gender specific. He Said/She Said reveals an unsettling truth too about the secrecy of abuse within romantic relationships, that, before revealed, the lover’s role as abuser can seem to the victim as unfathomable as the moon blocking out the sun. Yet as we know, these events do, and will, keep continuing to happen.

Review: The Ruby in The Smoke by Phillip Pullman

Rating 3/5

This review has been a long time coming, and not just because I finished this book in the middle of last month and have only just gotten around to writing about it. The Ruby in the Smoke, and the rest of the Sally Lockhart series, played a prominent feature on my childhood bookhelf, along with Phillip Pullman’s Northern Lights Trilogy, and to my shame I never finished any of them. Although Pullman’s novels are often aimed at the late childhood/young adult market, I’ve only truly begun to appreciate his storytelling as an adult. The Ruby in the Smoke never panders to its younger audience, nor shields them from a series of gruesome and unusual deaths, drug use and addiction, ranging in locations from the seediest underbelly of Victorian London and the furthest reaches of the British Empire. Sally’s world is revealed at a breakneck speed, which leaves you little time to reflect in the novel’s 207 pages. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel that adult readers are rarely treated to such a crisp slice of Neo-Victorianism, as the contemporary adult historical fiction market favours the epics of The Essex Serpent to the succinct brevity of description achieved by Pullman in this novel.

Indeed, it was strange, and did strike me at first as childish, to see Pullman write on many occasions about what was going to happen, directly before it happens, as a way of tantalising readers to carry on. By the second paragraph we have met the novel’s protagonist Sally Lockhart and know that ‘within fifteen minutes she [is] going to kill a man’ (pg 7). I read that sentence over and over as a child, knowing that something exciting was about to happen, but yet somehow still not being able to get any further than that line. This time though, I persevered, knowing that this couldn’t be entirely true of our heroine, and was not disappointed to see how events in the first chapter actually did turn out after all these years.

I began to realise as the novel progressed that it’s the unwavering nature of Sally’s good character (I use term loosely, although always morally just, she isn’t above a criminal act or ten), her strong determinism juxtaposed against murky world she inhabits, that is the key ingredient to anchor the reader into a story of so many different subplots and mysteries as The Ruby in the Smoke is.

Although I was pleasantly surprised to have not guessed the biggest twist in Sally’s story, the real events behind the traumatic nightmares from her childhood, I had to bring this book down from my original rating of 4/5 due to the sheer number of implausible things that happen in the last twenty pages or so. I feel like Pullman could have done with another chapter or two to tie up all the loose ends suitably, by giving the revelation Sally’s history longer to unfurl like the opium smoke that triggers her memory, rather than just bouncing from one shock to another like the stories in the pulp magazines that Sally’s young charge Jim devours.

Despite this, The Ruby in the Smoke was an enjoyable bit of childhood nostalgia for me, and I’ll be looking out for the rest of the series at second hand book shops in the future (I feel like the prize is just that much sweeter if you can find the exact edition you would have had from the time, rather than the latest reprint!).

Are there any books that you were meant to read in your childhood that you’d like to give a second chance now? Let me know what you think! Zoe x

Review: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

March 17, 20192 Comments

Rating: 1/5

Even an accidental perfume spillage couldn’t save this book for me

My first blog review encounters a serious hiccup – what happens when you really don’t like a book you’ve read and don’t know why?

I persevered with Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend as it was the choice for this month at my local book club. Even so, this is a book I’d had on my radar for a while, as contemporary female fiction is usually my thing (presuming Elena Ferrante really is a woman as her pseudonym suggests – no one really knows). I’m not daunted by reading a translated book either, and would even like to read more. So why was this much lauded book 331 pages of sheer torture for me?

I hoped that attending the Gloucester Book Club meeting would help solidify some of my thoughts. The meeting was great as always, with questions and context to help draw out our responses to the story. We learnt about some of the history of Naples where the book is set, (although for me the adage ‘see Naples and die’ took a new meaning when slogging through this book!) and I was encouraged to hear that everyone had struggled with the book’s dense sentences and provincial plot initially. However, unlike me, each other member had had their ‘aha!’ moment at some point in the book, when they became intoxicated with Ferrante’s storytelling, and even looked forward to reading or hearing about the next three (!) books in her Neopolitan quartet. It was said that listening to the audiobook or watching the recent HBO adaptation of the novels helped other members fall in love with the world of Lila and Lenu, but based on how I felt about the novel itself I’m not willing to risk it.

: The cover was the most interesting thing about this book, and even that was dull

What was missing for me in this book was ironicially what the narrating character Lenu discovers for herself more and more as the novel progresses, both in pursuit of academic excellence, and also most vividly whilst reading on the beaches of Ischia, where she feels as if she’s “dissolving into the pages like a jellyfish” (pg 281). Although I see a lot of myself in Lenu, and can empathise with the conflict of love versus envy when compared next to ‘brilliant’ female friends in a patriarchal world that only allows a set amount of space for women, I feel like Ferrante keeps telling us that My Brilliant Friend will be an important coming-of-age story without actually substantiating that claim with a sustained narrative interest beyond a few beautifully crafted passages.

The only moment that really melted my heart (and saved the book from a 0 star rating!) comes when Lenu is bathing Lila in preparation for her wedding. The two girls are still only 16, but Lenu broods like a scorned woman as she ceremoniously cleans her subject of her affections with as much adoration as she can, knowing that all her efforts will only lead to Lila’s future husband Stefano ‘sully[ing] her in the course of the night’ (pg 313). Lenu too feels that her high-school experience has been ‘sullied’ by the dawning realisation that no matter how much she studies, she will never truly experience the praise from their neighbourhood in the same way that Lila, the beautiful teenage virgin, is now experiencing through her wedding ritual.

The heartbreaking moment comes as Lila replies to Lenu’s dejected ‘thanks, but at a certain point school is over’ with ‘Not for you: you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls’ (pg 312). My heart breaks at the assumption that until that point in the book I had no doubt that Lila was the eponymous ‘brilliant friend’ of the title. The revelation that Lenu’s obsession is not a one-sided adolescent fantasy, but a mutual and reciprocated devotion, is a rare moment of tenderness that is glossed over again with wedding itself and the completely banal ending of the novel (spoiler: the big ending is the local big shot swans in wearing some shoes he’s not meant to have on. No – really).

I credit my study of literature at university for my ability to dissect a book at length, but also for my frustrating inability to like or dislike a book for with no obvious reason other than personal taste. When it’s been drummed in to you to back up every opinion with substantial evidence from the text for 4 years, reading and reviewing for pleasure afterwards is a difficult transition. What I will say about this book is the long sentences, overbearing detail, realism, moralistic tone, and extensive cast of characters in My Brilliant Friend reminded me of a Dickens novel. Whilst that might be high praise for many – I personally can’t stand a Dickens novel.

Are there any critically well-reviewed books that you wanted to like but actually struggled to enjoy? Please let me know in the comments section! Zoe x

Zoe Reads

Tag: book review

Review: He Said/She Said by Erin Kelly

Review: The Ruby in The Smoke by Phillip Pullman

Review: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante