Claiming her life: The Lodger, The Drum Tower and Our Souls at Night

A severe cold has meant very little writing in the last few days, but a copious amount of reading (completing my reading “challenge” of 100 books in the year), albeit with not a great amount of depth. These three short reviews of novels about three very different women’s quests for a life, and a mind, of their own is part of the result.

After her father’s bankruptcy and her mother’s death from suicide, Dorothy Richardson has come to London to work as a dentist’s assistant. Renting a room in a Bloomsbury boarding-house, she values her freedom, but life is hard for a single woman on a low income at the beginning of the twentieth century. Invited to spend the weekend at the coast with an old school friend, she is initially unimpressed by her husband, Bertie, a writer of some renown. But Bertie’s approval of her independent mind quickly beguiles her and, despite the guilt at betraying her friend, Dorothy embarks on a secret affair. When the sex proves a disappointment, Dorothy is unsure whether she should expect more, until a new boarder teaches her the meaning of sexual pleasure. But, in her liaison with Veronica while still involved with Bertie, Dorothy finds herself caught between two types of taboo. On top of this, Veronica is a suffragette whose involvement in the movement puts her at risk of imprisonment.

I was more convinced by Dorothy’s romance with Veronica than with Bertie, although that might reflect the imposition of my own values on the pair’s disregard of the feelings of her friend and his wife. Yet the author had good reason for dwelling more on the former relationship, as the characters are based on significant figures in the literary world (although, I’m not generally enamoured of fiction about writers). Bertie – or HG Wells as he is more commonly known – I was aware of as the pioneer of science fiction and, according to my mother, a distant relative of ours (quite probably via one of his other extramarital affairs). But Dorothy Richardson was hitherto unknown to me so it was interesting to learn about this peer of Virginia Woolf and innovator of stream of consciousness writing, and poignant to witness a gradual sexual and authorial awakening within the novel while aware that, in the real world, she’d soon be forgotten.
In an afterword, Louise Treger tells us that she stumbled on Dorothy Richardson by accident while searching for a new angle on Virginia Woolf for her PhD thesis. I received my copy via her New York publisher, St Martin’s Press.

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Seventeen-year-old Talkhoon (meaning tarragon or bitter blood) lives in the basement of a crumbling property known as Drum Tower in Tehran. The Shah’s rule is collapsing and revolution is around the corner but Talkhoon, sequestered from the world since an undiagnosed psychosomatic illness some years before, has enough to contend with in a confused and conflicted family. Abandoned by her mother at three days old, visited intermittently by her fugitive father, she’s been brought up by her disturbing uncle Asaad, in a house also occupied by her sister, grandparents and numerous ghosts. Having dedicated his life to an as yet uncompleted tome on the mythology of the Simorgh, or Firebird, her beloved grandfather seems to have slipped into a coma, while her increasingly bitter grandmother stomps around the house or sits upstairs among the ghosts communing with her own dead father, the General. Seemingly oblivious to the madness in their home, Talkhoon’s elder sister, Taara, continues her schooling, plays her setar and goes looking for romance. As dissent mounts both in the household and in the city at large, Talkhoon discovers that she must overcome her mental health problems in order to escape the confines of her life. But Asaad has designs on her, and it’s only his increasing religiosity and disavowal of sex outside marriage, that protects her. But for how long?

Perhaps because of the element of magic realism, I didn’t find it so easy to connect with this novel as I did with others from Sandstone Press (e.g. The Zoo; The Insect Rosary; The Spice Box Letters; The Surfacing). Despite my interest in this historical period, which formed the basis of my short story “Elementary Mechanics”, I probably missed some of the nuances of the parallels between the in-the-house story and the political upheaval of the time. I was also curious about the author’s own story of political activism which led to her having to flee the country across the mountains with her two-year-old son, but maybe I need to check whether she’s fictionalised that elsewhere.

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This moving, deceptively simple, novel opens with Addie Moore, a seventy-year-old widow, inviting her neighbour, Louis Waters, to stay the night. Once he’s got over his initial shock, he agrees to the proposition, and a couple embark on a deeply satisfying friendship that, nevertheless, scandalises their adult children and neighbours in the small town of Holt, Colorado. It takes great skill to write about ordinary happiness, but Kent Haruf has it in spades (or did have; he died in 2014 and this novel was published posthumously), with an emotional depth below the surface simplicity somewhat reminiscent of Anne Tyler. Under the bed clothes, the couple review their pasts, acknowledging the unrealised, or even unidentified, ambition that characterises many lives, while, in the daytime, providing a safe haven from his feuding parents for Addie’s six-year-old grandson. Yet, while I’m not renowned for my optimism, I did wonder at the almost universal disapproval of their relationship (save for the more elderly neighbour in the house between theirs), and whether it was the author’s, or the characters’, failure of nerve that made Addie succumb to their spoiling envy. Until then, an uplifting tale that reminds us to make the best of the life we’ve got. Thanks to Picador Books for my review copy.

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Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this quiet late-life love story as much on the second reading on publication in 2015. In the intervening years, I’d managed to forget the tragic ending when the couple succumbs to bigotry.