Alice in Wonderland (Susan Elkin reviews)

I usually try to feature at least one seasonal book each December. Having now run though all the obvious stories known to me, I did a bit of trawling for something new and this title jumped out at me. It obviously fitted the seasonal requirement although I didn’t know Beth Moran’s work at all and, to be honest, feared I might find it a bit “pulpy.” In the event I enjoyed it a lot – original idea, strong characters with whom I liked spending time, some darkness offset by plenty of “feel good” which stops short of sentimentality.

Mary is alone in a dingy cottage in Sherwood Forest (apparently most of Moran’s books are set in or around Nottinghamshire’s famous woodland). It is late October.  She is heavily pregnant and we realise immediately first, that dreadful things have happened to put her in this position and second, that she is actually in labour for which she is completely unprepared. She calls a taxi and the driver, Beckett can see instantly what’s happening because he happens to have trained as a doctor. They end up in a rather wonderful new age church because they get stuck in traffic and things are happening too fast to make it to the hospital. The baby, Bob, is born there and suddenly Mary is surrounded by some of the loveliest, most caring, least judgemental people I’ve ever met in fiction (or in real life for that matter).

Like Mary, Beckett is damaged by things which have happened to him. He too is friendless and in desperate need of support. Why isn’t he working as a doctor?  At home he is single-handedly  trying to look after his pretty difficult grandfather who brought him up. Gramps is an engaging character although I’m not totally convinced by his calculatedly feigned dementia. The post-stroke disinhibition is plausible, though.  Gradually Beckett and Mary become friends, helping each other in practical ways, and one senses that eventually it will be more than that. And in a book of this sort, all set in the run-up to Christmas, the happy ending is a given although, of course, there are many tantalising lets, hindrances and misunderstandings along the way.

Moran uses a quite interesting split narrative technique between Mary and Beckett, telling his story in the third person and hers in the first so we see things marginally more vividly from her point of view. The reader, of course, is curious to learn what on earth has happened to them both in the past and Moran drip feeds information so that you keep turning the pages. I devoured this book in two days.

I loved the idea of the supportive Coffee Mums Club and was moved by the sobering back stories of these stoical women, all so different but so determined to be there for each other, come what may.  Moses, the pastor at the church is a delight –  sensible, reliable, understanding and never preachy. He and his wife Sofia have adopted five traumatised children. Then there’s the jolly New Life Community Church Christmas Carol Concert, for which Mary makes the costumes (fashion is her background) thereby finding herself a purpose and making new friends at the same time as caring for Bob.

And the novel works towards reconciliation – with caveats – as the season of goodwill approaches. Mary is estranged both from her chilly parents and the two lifelong friends with whom she developed a highly successful business. Beckett really can’t cope with Gramps any longer not least because hiring in care (I empathised with this – been there, done that) is so fraught with difficulty. Things have to change and they do. The new year promises lots of moving on.

In short this is a thoughtful novel which tells a good yarn and ranges over a wide range of serious issues. One of its themes is forgiveness and that’s spot on for this time of year.

I wish, though, that publishers (Boldwood Books, in this case) would drop the concept of “women’s fiction”. This book has lots of characters of both sexes and isn’t in any sense a book that a man couldn’t read and enjoy. Yes, the leading view point is female but nobody describes Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre or To Kill a Mockingbird as “women’s fiction” so for goodness sake let’s stop categorising.

Next Week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood

Tennyson and I go back a long way. He was my O Level poet and I remember loving the sensuous musicality of Oenone, The Lady of Shalott, Ulysess and more. So I asked for, and was given, a complete works of Tennyson for my 21^st birthday, which I still have. Actually, had I but known it, I’d been carrying Tennyson around with me for a lot longer than that. “Knowledge is no more a fountain sealed” comes from Tennyson’s great plea for women’s education, The Princess (1847). It was, and is, the motto of the Girls Day School Trust (Girls Public Day School Trust in my day).  So we had that unequivocal statement on the  circumference of the hat badges we were obliged (dire penalties if we didn’t) to wear every day pinned to our velours and panamas at Sydenham High School, where I started on a London County Council-funded place in 1958.

Once I began teaching English in secondary schools, Tennyson appeared in all the anthologies through which we tried to instil a love of poetry in our students. And when I finally got round to doing a taught Masters with the Open University in my forties, the subject was nineteenth century poetry so there he was again. Yes, Alfred Tennyson and I are old friends.

No one has ever really pointed out to me however – and definitely not my very conventional Christian O level English teacher – that almost everything Tennyson wrote in the first half of his life was shot though with burgeoning new scientific ideas which challenged conventional views of “God” and his creations. Enter Richard Holmes with this hugely informative, astonishingly well researched account of Tennyson’s experience, influences and thinking in those, sometimes turbulent, years before 1850 – the year in which, aged 41 he published In Memoriam, married Emily Sellwood and became Poet Laureate. “At last …” was the feeling among his friends with regard to the first two of those events.

Holmes’s subtitle is “Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief” and the book details, mostly, the first 40 years of his life before he morphed into the familiar heavily bearded establishment figure living in considerable comfort at Farringford House on the Isle of Wight with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as neighbours. And the contrast is extraordinary. He even found ways of coming to terms with conventional religious belief.

Holmes uses Tennyson’s poem The Kraken, written while the poet was still at Trinity College, Cambridge, as a running metaphor for his inner demons, doubts and depressions: the terrifying sea monster “battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep”.  And of course that almost unimaginably horrifying creature links with the burgeoning interest in palaeontology which surrounded him. Tennyson read, absorbed and was influenced by Charles Lyell’s geological discoveries and theories along with Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by Robert Chambers (1844) and many other books which confronted the roots of nineteenth century thought. Creative agnosticism was becoming almost respectable. Atheism was still feared and loathed.

The young Tennyson could be excellent company. He was good looking with a beautiful voice and a gift for mimicry. A troubled childhood – one of eleven – with an abusive father in a Lincolnshire rectory probably contributed to some of his inner turmoil but he found a strong circle of friends at Trinity College, Cambridge including, famously, his beloved Arthur Hallam. Hallam died suddenly in his early twenties and the loss devasted Tennyson for the next 20 years. The many “grief” poems he wrote over two decades eventually came together to form In Memoriam which sold enormously well and made Tennyson rich. His elder son (born 1852) was named Hallam which, Holmes speculates, probably helped to bring closure for his father.

Another theme running though this biography is Tennyson’s close friendship with the sensible, jovial Edward “Fitz” Fitzgerald who later translated/wrote The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyan (1859 ). We share Holmes’s sadness as the two men eventually drifted apart. At the same time, though, Tennyson was beginning to meet and associate with just about every nineteenth century writer, philosopher, scientist and economist you can think of. Holmes is very good at context.

It’s richly readable, entertaining, full of things I didn’t know and offers new takes on familiar poems. If like mine, your head often rattles with the rhymes and rhythms of Mariana, The Lotos Eaters and the rest – like favourite pieces of music –  you will enjoy, and learn a lot from, The Boundless Deep.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Most Wonderful Time of the Year by Beth Moran