When Nina first encounters Emma in the street after all these years, she seems afraid and at pains to avoid her. But by the end of the summer she’s engineered an entry into the other woman’s life via a piece of mischief disguised as a favour. Over the next few months, Nina makes herself Emma’s confidante, while secretly despising her both for the narrowness of her current existence and for some as yet undisclosed transgression in the past. Emma, exhausted by early motherhood and adrift from her previous professional persona, is flattered by Nina’s attention and unconscious of any previous encounter. In chapters of exquisite prose narrated by alternate women, we glimpse their separate and intersecting lives to eventually discover the root of Nina’s grudge against Emma and how far she will go to wreak her revenge.
I was really excited to receive my review copy of Her but somehow it wasn’t the book I anticipated. The language and descriptions are gorgeous: you can open the book at random on any page and find something delightful, for example
There’s a free bench by the tennis courts, the one I usually choose, donated in memory of a violinist who liked to sit here. Inside the wire box, a twenty-something coach is putting some trim PTA-types through their paces, patting balls relentlessly over the net, shouting instructions and reprimands. (p118)
The ending was satisfying in its dark ambiguity and left me pondering long after I turned the last page. Yet one of the things I pondered was whether I was the right kind of reader: I adored Harriet Lane’s debut, Alys, Always, but I didn’t experience Frances, the protagonist, as quite as malevolently manipulative as the publicity blurb suggested I should. In contrast, I found Nina’s character comprehensible only in retrospect and struggled to summon any sympathy for a woman with no qualms about upsetting infants, no matter how strongly she believes their mother has harmed her. As with That Dark Remembered Day, I felt the “big reveal” was unnecessarily delayed: I’d have found the story more gripping had the nature of Nina’s grievance against Emma been more strongly foreshadowed and explored. While both characters were fleshed-out in terms of their current routines and relationships, this often served as a distraction from the plot to such an extent that I was dumbfounded to find myself, about fifty pages before the end, attending the wedding of two people I never knew existed. Given the centrality to the plot of the women’s shared history, I’d have happily swapped such episodes for more flashback to childhood, foregoing breadth of character in favour of greater depth. This might have given Emma an extra edge; although she was certainly the more sympathetic character, she seemed less of a person than a stretcher-bearer for the agonies of full-time motherhood. However, her vulnerability was sufficient to convince me that she was ripe for exploitation. Finally, because the scenes featuring both women together were narrated from both points of view, there was a lot of repetition. Overall, it seemed as if a talented writer with a flair for language had grabbed a great idea for a short story and stretched it into a novel.
Apologies to regular readers for a second post reviewing novels on poisonous female friendship and thanks to Orion for my review copy. Her is published in the UK today.
What do you think is the best way to give depth to a character? Do you like to see them in their everyday relationships? Do you want to know how they’ve got to where they are today?
There’s a free bench by the tennis courts, the one I usually choose, donated in memory of a violinist who liked to sit here. Inside the wire box, a twenty-something coach is putting some trim PTA-types through their paces, patting balls relentlessly over the net, shouting instructions and reprimands. (p118)
The ending was satisfying in its dark ambiguity and left me pondering long after I turned the last page. Yet one of the things I pondered was whether I was the right kind of reader: I adored Harriet Lane’s debut, Alys, Always, but I didn’t experience Frances, the protagonist, as quite as malevolently manipulative as the publicity blurb suggested I should. In contrast, I found Nina’s character comprehensible only in retrospect and struggled to summon any sympathy for a woman with no qualms about upsetting infants, no matter how strongly she believes their mother has harmed her. As with That Dark Remembered Day, I felt the “big reveal” was unnecessarily delayed: I’d have found the story more gripping had the nature of Nina’s grievance against Emma been more strongly foreshadowed and explored. While both characters were fleshed-out in terms of their current routines and relationships, this often served as a distraction from the plot to such an extent that I was dumbfounded to find myself, about fifty pages before the end, attending the wedding of two people I never knew existed. Given the centrality to the plot of the women’s shared history, I’d have happily swapped such episodes for more flashback to childhood, foregoing breadth of character in favour of greater depth. This might have given Emma an extra edge; although she was certainly the more sympathetic character, she seemed less of a person than a stretcher-bearer for the agonies of full-time motherhood. However, her vulnerability was sufficient to convince me that she was ripe for exploitation. Finally, because the scenes featuring both women together were narrated from both points of view, there was a lot of repetition. Overall, it seemed as if a talented writer with a flair for language had grabbed a great idea for a short story and stretched it into a novel.
Apologies to regular readers for a second post reviewing novels on poisonous female friendship and thanks to Orion for my review copy. Her is published in the UK today.
What do you think is the best way to give depth to a character? Do you like to see them in their everyday relationships? Do you want to know how they’ve got to where they are today?
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