Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien

The Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien is a deceptively complex book. It deals with relationships between two women, Dilly and Eleanora, who live very different lives some years apart. They are both women, but they come from different generations. They are both Irish, but they seem to belong to different countries, as well as different eras. They both leave their homeland to seek fortune, but on wholly different terms and to different places. They both seem to stumble into relationships with men, some of which involve marriage, and cope in partially successful ways with the challenges posed by maintaining the terms of engagement. The complications in the relationship between the two women, Dilly and Eleanora, arise because they are mother and daughter.

At the start, we meet Dilly, the mother, who is in hospital in Dublin. Her years have advanced. She is seriously ill and about to undergo a procedure. Her youth flashes before her sedated eyes. She travels from Ireland to the United States and we follow a developing life in New York as it moves from promised opportunity to promised opportunity, only to find that reality usually imposes its surprisingly mundane results. Wiser, but only marginally richer, Dilly soon finds herself repatriated for family reasons.

We meet Eleanora via scenes from her marriage. She too has left Ireland, but she has personal reasons and she has pursued education. She seems to be in control, at least potentially in control of her life options. She is apparently free to choose and we see her relocate for professional rather than menial reasons. But she seems to spend as much of her time and energy analyzing her relationships with men as pursuing her professional goals. The turns in her life are unpredictable, often unfathomable. They have a gloss of normality imposed by obvious consumption, personality created by likes and dislikes and achievement realized through opportunity. It is a life that presents a vivid contrast to the life of Dilly, whose own journey was imposed by a need to make a living first and a personal space second.

But the real complication arises because these two women, doing what women do a generation apart are mother and daughter. Letters exchanged form a major part of the book’s substance, specifically letters between mother and daughter. These letters often do not appear to say very much, but then that becomes a crucial point in the narrative. Deceptively simple, they can also deceive by not saying what the writer wants to say, by not communicating what the reader wants to hear.

Overall the plot of Edna O’Brien’s novel dwells almost exclusively on the nature of the relationship between mother and daughter, the difference and similarities that make their lives. It travels the world that surrounds their different generations, drawing sharp contrasts but also recognizing remarkable similarities. It’s a book that walks well-worn paths, but arrives at new experiences for the reader. Rather than the substance of life, it is the spaces between, whether large or small, that captivate. And, by the end, we realize that for all our complications, we individuals are generally ruled by self and can often be driven by quite mundane, but devastatingly relentless material concerns.

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson seems to explore the identity conferred on an individual via family. "Seems to" is important here, because what exactly might constitute family for Gretel, the novel's principal character, is always a negotiable point. For many of us, the concept of family can be clearly defined. Its reality is often identifiable, possibly supportive, even dependable. But for others a family can be a site of struggle, a source of conflict, an indefinable and disquieting lack of trust. In either of these extremes, or indeed anywhere else on the spectrum that links them, a child is his or her own individual, an individual that can react against or absorb into whatever form a family might take. Equally, that individual can adopt the family norms, be they for eventual good or ill. Everything Under examines some of these possibilities from Gretel's point of view, Gretel the daughter of a mother she increasingly seems not to know and has not met for many years.

Gretel seems to live a simple, dedicated and ordered life, with perhaps more than an element of self-imposed isolation. She is a lexicographer, examining the accuracy and scope of dictionary entries. Words thus matter to her. They are her bread and butter. Though she has not seen her mother since she was sixteen, she still has vivid memories of words they shared, words her mother invented to label things otherwise indescribable. As an adult, Gretel finds her world turned upside down by the reappearance of a woman she probably only ever partially knew, but whose own identity has now been transformed by age. Communication is hit and miss, sometimes lucid, sometimes mythical, sometimes disconnected. Gretel, however, decides to relive her past via the family life she can either remember or reconstruct, reliably or otherwise via conversation and reflection with her mother.

And that life was indeed somewhat unconventional. She and her mother lived on a boat that was moored on a river. The waters were, it seems, always murky. Gretel never really knew her father, and one of the areas she tries to uncover via her partial engagement with her mother is nothing less than the truth about her own beginnings. The water on which the family boat floated stayed murky throughout Gretel's childhood, and, it seems, has not cleared since then.

Complicating the scene is the fact that she and her mother used to communicate via code words, sounds they themselves invented to describe the unknowns, the lurking dangers or merely the otherwise unspeakable things that can surface to threaten these lives lived in a microcosm of their own invention. There is apparently much to uncover, and not all of it is accessible. And when this private language, these codes for the unmentionable, invade either a mother's or a daughter's memory, they are used to hide something difficult, to obfuscate, as if to ensure their meaning remains unknown, unacknowledged.

Characters alternate between the present and memories of a limited family life on their moored boat. There are demons to confront and assumptions to deconstruct. The water, if anything, becomes murkier when stirred. And if there is a criticism of this forensic reconstruction of a shared but only partially remembered past, then it lies in its tendency to over-complicate. It is perhaps minor point, but one might have expected Gretel, with her professional desire for accuracy in everything to do with words, not to tolerate such obfuscation.

Mother and daughter's invented vocabulary seems, however, to extend to only a few words. This is hardly the "language" we are told they shared. The words reappear in different contexts to indicate apparently different things. Unpicking how these labels have been applied to their shared experience forms a significant element of plot. But again, though much is made of these few words, they hardly constitute the "invented language" of the book's preamble.

Everything Under thus evolves into a complex, complicated and inevitably confused uncovering of this relationship between mother and daughter. Truths are revealed and unconsciously absorbed detail is newly remembered to add context. Throughout, however, we feel that, in essence, things were probably a little simpler than each character's desire to speculate might allow. In some ways this is the book's strength, since Everything Under is a tangle of memories, a tangle of relationships and possibly an undergrowth of old stems that even the participants have neglected to prune.

Everything Under is a challenging read around what is essentially a simple idea. But, when reality finally knocks on the door and these characters find they must own up to the detail of their family life, there are revelations and surprises which, paradoxically, change nothing. Perhaps many families are like that.

The Millstone by Margaret Drabble

Rosamund Stacey is the first person narrator of her own story in the Millstone by Margaret Drabble. Rosamund is a single mother – nothing strange about that, perhaps, at least in a twenty-first century Britain where now half of births are outside of marriage. But in the early 1960s, when The Millstone was written, unmarried mothers were not so common and it was a status to which considerable stigma was attached. Consequently, when Rosamund visits hospital for her regular check-ups, she is summoned from the waiting room with a call of Mrs. Stacey in an attempt to maintain the privacy of her status. She longs for the day – and not too distant – when her thesis on Elizabethan poetry will be complete and she can prefix her name with Dr., thereby avoiding the deception.

The Millstone is written in Margaret Drabble’s conversational, yet dense style. The characters are highly complex and seem to live their lives with a devotion to intricacy. Not much happens to them, however, and events are few and far between. Rosamund’s life is a case in point. It was Cambridge, of course, followed by the relative comfort of a flat in central London, an apartment provided by her parents calculatedly close to the British Museum, where she does most of her research.

She is definitely not the run-of-the-mill young lass who attends university nowadays, our Rosamund. She has a boyfriend at college, of course, but they never sleep together, not even on the occasion they jointly plan to accomplish the act. Rosamund is not really into sex, she thinks. She has a tendency to see herself as an object from without, and her observation of the absurdity of various aspects of being human lead her to a life slightly removed from reality, lived apparently at arm’s length from experience. Though she sees quite a lot of Joe and Roger – both quite different but eligible males – the idea of anything other than a chat and a drink appalls her. Each of the two men, of course, think that the other is the boyfriend and so are loath to raise the subject.

Then, for some reason hardly known to herself, she takes up with George, a gay radio presenter, and sleeps with him. Just once. And yes, Rosamund is definitively pregnant. As ever, she cannot decide what to do and, even when she eventually plans her course, she is blown off onto a different tack. She has read that drinking a bottle of gin in a hot bath might do the trick. She sets an evening aside. And then, just as the bottle is opened, friends turn up, she offers them a drink and they share the otherwise-ntended gin between them. Rosamund is thus never really in control, despite appearing to have a strangle hold on her life. Circumstances always seem to conspire to prevent her getting precisely what she wants.

But this is eventually seen as an illusion. Perhaps she does get precisely what she wants, but does not tell us, or herself. And so Octavia is born. The baby is a life that Rosamund contemplated ending, but when the child is ill, the thought of her coming to harm is too painful to admit. A friend, Lydia, moves in, shares the costs and sets about writing a novel. When this is complete, an unsupervised Octavia tears much of it up, though perhaps not disastrously. Rosamund reminds us that babies are persistent, not thorough, so most of the pages are preserved. It becomes the mother’s trauma, however. Rosamund could be described as measured, always apparently in control, yet always feeling she is swept along with the tide. Passionate she is not.

When George, who still does not know he is Octavia’s father, says she might do well with a husband, Rosamund agrees, but only because it would be nice to have someone who could help to fill in the tax return. George is no better, since for his the purpose of marriage seems to be to provide someone to iron his shirts. It’s all terribly British. But the characters are beautifully drawn, expertly pitched against themselves and their relationships. The Millstone, thus, explores motivation and achievement, and the relationship between selfishness and selflessness. In the end, we are who we are.

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