Iris Lockhart’s life is far from straight-forward – she has a business to run, a tightrope act to negotiate with her married lover, a complicated relationship with her step-brother, and she has to find time to visit her grandmother before dementia completely takes her away. So when she started getting calls about a Euphemia Lennox, who she’s never heard of, she knows someone has a wrong number.
Cauldstone psychiatric hospital is closing, its inmates patients are being released into the community, and after over sixty years Iris’s grandmother Kitty’s younger sister Esme is coming home. Only there’s nobody Iris can ask about Esme – Iris’s father died when she was tiny, her mother has never heard her mother-in-law speak of a sister (Kitty used to talk about being an only child), and Kitty herself floats in and out of lucidity.
The men in her life urge Iris to wash her hands of the woman, but there’s a bond, responsibility, and the hostel the hospital have organised is appalling. Surely there can be no harm having Esme stay in what once was, after all, her own home? Just for a weekend.
In a rare burst of restraint, I saw this book while I was overseas last year and didn’t buy it. Instead, a model of economy and discipline, I write the details in my notepad. Here we are, some six months later, and Borders had it on their infamous table. After all that waiting I just had to start it within a week of bringing it home.
The writing looks simple but demonstrates a deft and gifted hand. The characters, from Esme and Kitty’s parents to the men in Iris’s life, are sympathetic even when their behaviour is morally unsound, and nobody holds any moral high ground. The book is written in a non-linear way that allows the reader to piece together for themselves past and unfolding events. Information comes from Iris and Esme’s views of current events; Esme’s flashbacks to her childhood in India, her family’s return to England when Esme was sixteen, and the difficult transition to a very different life; and Kitty’s guilt-tinged stream of consciousness, where her tight grasp on long-held secrets is being eroded by Alzheimer’s.
This technique is remarkably effective, and the lack of explicit detail and linking makes the impact of the unfolding, tragic story all the more potent. That the story’s foundation – a woman locked away for her entire adult life primarily because she was outspoken and unconventional – is true makes it profoundly chilling, particularly to this female audience. I found the ending shocking and both inevitable and preventable, which I realise is nonsensical. At first I was resentful about it, because I had hoped for something that would compensate Esme. But the plot as a whole has stayed with me all day, resonating in surprising ways and with the most unexpected clarity. In particular I felt parallels with the protagonists in my two most recently read works, Geography Club’s Russel and Bad Kitty’s Jas. In another era either could have been another Esme. - Alex
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