08 May 2013 04:10:25
"People who don't know who they are can't speak," reflects Jeanne Nérin, one of the four female narrators of this multi-generational tale set, for the most part, in a couple of nearby towns in Vichy France. The characters are ignorant in all sorts of ways – their lives are cramped by Catholicism, by parochialism, by the passiveness and submission instilled in them as girls, and perhaps above all by poverty – but this lack of self-knowledge is crucial. It's only when Jeanne realises its absence that hope flickers into her story.The novel begins with a pre-adolescent Jeanne incarcerated in a convent boarding school: her widowed mother, a converted former Jew, is ill. She and Marie-Angèle, another boarder with Jewish blood and a mother who can't cope, sneak next door into the house of a reclusive artist, who plays hide-and-seek with them. What else happens there isn't entirely clear.
Afterwards, the visit is hushed up by the nuns, and while Marie-Angèle reverts to meek rule-following, Jeanne returns to the house, where the games continue. There's horror to be found in the straightforward descriptions of what ensues, but also excitement as new terrains open up. Jeanne demands drawing lessons, and art becomes a way of working out who she is.
Roberts is a disciplined and elegant writer, with 12 previously published novels, including the Booker-shortlisted Daughters of the House, which also deals with girlhood, religion and sex. The drab world she evokes here is full of telling details, like the sweat stains that are never washed out of white blouses, "cardboard" boots and barleycorn coffee. It's a reminder, in an era of "Keep Calm" posters, how much harder things have been than they currently are.
All this doesn't slow down the action, which is powered along by plenty of unanswered questions and deeply buried emotion. Roberts conjures feelings obliquely: a grown-up, tightly wound Marie-Angèle gets so angry at the state of a battered old pram she can't look at it; later, "tired walls" lean in on Jeanne, who must "prop them up". While the plot is pure melodrama, it's made painfully real by this steely prose.
