Finding Fiction in the Cracks: A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Bray and a 99-word Flash

If fiction thrives on strong emotion and conflict, Carys Bray’s debut novel, about what happens to a Mormon family after their youngest member dies, has all the right ingredients. Grief, while painful to experience, is a powerful launching pad for fiction and, as Derbhile Dromey commented in response to my post on religion and the right to die debate, religion channels conflict in believer and unbeliever alike.

Review of A Song For Issy Bradley

While four-year-old Issy Bradley is languishing in bed with undiagnosed meningitis, her mother, Claire, is shopping in Asda for affordable party food. Issy’s father, Ian, bishop of the local congregation, is out doing good works for the community and her big sister, Zippy, is lost in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Of her two brothers, seven-year-old Jacob, is swallowing his disappointment that his dad won’t be able to attend his birthday party and teenager Alma is looking for an escape route so he can go off and play football. When Issy dies, the family’s religious faith proves to be both a source of consolation and pain. The future focus, with the belief that the family will be reunited in eternity, is reassuring for Ian, as he keeps up his church duties, unaware of how much he is neglecting his family and exhausting himself. Claire, who, unlike the other Bradleys, did not grow up as a Mormon but converted when she met Ian, has always found comfort in the sense of order and obedience to a higher power, now feels deserted by God:

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There is something intoxicating about the subjugation of the self. She feels it every month on Fast Sundays when her brain, high in the nutrient-free atmosphere at the summit of her body, becomes airy, almost weightless – by the time she has gone twenty-four hours without food or water it feels as if she could step outside herself and float all the way up to heaven. She feels similarly buoyant whenever she is required to be obedient to an incomprehensible commandment; there is something horribly appealing about the idea that someone – God, a prophet, Ian – knows exactly what is best and if she obeys their dictates with exactness everything will come right. She has practised obedience as a precaution up to this point, as a means of ensuring everything will turn out all right in the end. But things can never turn out right now. (p291)

When she takes to her bed – or, rather, her deceased daughter’s small bunkbed – her husband feels both embarrassed and confused: his church has no place for grief. Meanwhile, the three remaining children are deprived of the parental attention they so desperately need. The youngest, Jacob conducts experiments with dead birds and insects to pave the way for the miracle that will bring back his sister:

‘Dear Heavenly Father. I have faith that you can resurrect the bird. This is a real prayer. It’s not like asking for a bike or something, it’s important. When you resurrect the bird, I will have even more faith. And then there can be even better miracles. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.’ (p134)

Alma struggles to balance his own aspirations with his immersion in a culture that portrays his beloved football as an irrelevant distraction while grooming him for the obligatory two years as a missionary when he leaves school at eighteen. Meanwhile, love-struck Ziggy prepares for her gender-determined future role as homemaker in a bizarre ceremony in which teenage girls parade in their mothers’ wedding dresses and write shopping lists for their ideal husbands.

A Song for Issy Bradley is a moving and unexpectedly amusing portrayal of bereavement and religious belief that I can wholeheartedly recommend. Thanks to Charlotte Bush at Hutchinson for my review copy. Thanks also to the author for submitting to my debut novelist Q&A – do pop along there for an insight into her writing process, her feelings for her characters and writing from her own experience.

 Finding Fiction in the Cracks

Meanwhile, I’ve been reflecting on the latest post from Charli Mills on mining her creativity from the gaps, cracks and contradictions in the historical records in conjunction with my own ongoing quest to use my reading to learn how to write. I hear the advice to nail my characters’ motivation and to thwart them on their quest to fulfil their desires, but it doesn’t tally with my experience as a reader. It strikes me that A Song for Issy Bradley can be conceived as a novel about cracks: cracks that occur at the level of the individual, the family system and the wider community.

Claire has married Ian, not because he’s the person who can make her most herself, but because his religion means he’ll never leave her the way her father left her mother. Ian cannot envisage that she would have opinions of her own, independent of the diktats of their creed:

‘We don’t do this, Claire.’
‘Don’t tell me what “we” do.’
‘Well, we don’t.’
‘I want to.’
‘We concentrate on the resurrection. That’s why we don’t have crosses everywhere. I shouldn’t have to tell you, you know this – the empty tomb, that’s what we think about, not the body left behind.’
‘Stop telling me what to do.’
‘I’m not, I’m trying to explain –‘ (p158)

The unforeseen death of their youngest child brings out the cracks in their marriage and in the religion that has otherwise sustained them. Claire discovers that some emotions cannot be contained within the Mormon church.

Everyday life is full of cracks that have been papered over, weaknesses and gaps in ourselves and our situations that circumstances enable us to ignore. It turns into a story when those cracks begin to show. The story develops through the widening of the cracks until a crisis point is reached and something has to give. The crack might arise through a mismatch between what a character wants and what the world can deliver, but it doesn’t have to be so.

Crack Flash

Before I go off to look for more fiction in the cracks, I’ll leave you with Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” which has a great line about cracks ... and my response to Charli’s latest flash fiction challenge:

That long jagged one above her dressing table is like the Amalfi Coast where they went on honeymoon. Where he cheated on her the first time. The short straight one above the window reminds her of the Caesarean scar from the baby they made when he promised not to hurt her again. That one branching like a tree evokes his other family, his secret second wife whose children do not die.
So much time she’s wasted alone in bed staring at the cracks in ceiling. Dreaming, not thinking, not daring to wonder why her man was so late home.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to your comments on any aspect of this post.