My final two reviews of 2022 are tenuously linked by being set in closed communities in which unempathic people hold vulnerable creatures in their power. I refer to creatures less because the staff of the nightmare care home in the first novel don’t seem to regard their charges as human and more because the inmates of the second – where the compassion of the lowliest employee almost compensates for the attitude of her senior colleagues – are dolphins.
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Feeding Time by Adam Biles
Four years into retirement, and with a marriage ruined by her husband’s dementia, Dot has had enough of life. When she books herself into an old folks’ home, she knows not to expect the comforts depicted in the brochure, but she couldn’t have imagined quite how dreadful Green Oaks would be.
There is much to admire in the dark comedy – albeit often too brutal for my taste – and in the powerfully energetic prose. But what is this novel about? Half of the quotes the publishers – Galley Beggar Press – have chosen to feature on the back cover refer to a theme of old age. Yet the older characters are only in their seventies when most people of that age of my acquaintance are enjoying purposeful lives. I don’t think it’s even a story of cruel incarceration, of people cut off from the social whirl.
The focus seems more on the younger characters: the middle-aged manager who hides away in his office and the amoral and alienated youths paid a pittance to care. Which they don’t. Perhaps it’s about what happens when young people who’ve lost all hope for the future find themselves bored at work. Projecting their self-loathing onto their vulnerable charges, they drive themselves progressively mad.
There is much to admire in the dark comedy – albeit often too brutal for my taste – and in the powerfully energetic prose. But what is this novel about? Half of the quotes the publishers – Galley Beggar Press – have chosen to feature on the back cover refer to a theme of old age. Yet the older characters are only in their seventies when most people of that age of my acquaintance are enjoying purposeful lives. I don’t think it’s even a story of cruel incarceration, of people cut off from the social whirl.
The focus seems more on the younger characters: the middle-aged manager who hides away in his office and the amoral and alienated youths paid a pittance to care. Which they don’t. Perhaps it’s about what happens when young people who’ve lost all hope for the future find themselves bored at work. Projecting their self-loathing onto their vulnerable charges, they drive themselves progressively mad.
The Dolphin House by Audrey Schulman
Partially deaf since childhood, and handicapped by others’ prejudice, Cora finds she can communicate better with animals than with people. So she couldn’t be happier when she gets the chance to swap her low-paid job as a waitress to care for the dolphins in an island research centre. She soon discovers, however, that there’s as much misogyny within the scientific community as in bar work and she’s more at risk from the researchers than the dolphins.
Concerned about her employer’s barbaric methods, she proposes an experiment that will protect the dolphins while giving the researchers the fame and success they crave. Cora will live, eat and sleep in a watery world with a young dolphin, like a mother and with her baby, and teach it to speak.
Inspired by a real experiment in the mid-1960s, it is a lovely novel about ambition versus empathy, and the different ways we might fail to hear. Thanks to publishers Europa editions for my review copy.
Concerned about her employer’s barbaric methods, she proposes an experiment that will protect the dolphins while giving the researchers the fame and success they crave. Cora will live, eat and sleep in a watery world with a young dolphin, like a mother and with her baby, and teach it to speak.
Inspired by a real experiment in the mid-1960s, it is a lovely novel about ambition versus empathy, and the different ways we might fail to hear. Thanks to publishers Europa editions for my review copy.
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