Learning to live with love
by Gail Honeyman
HarperCollins, £12.99 ELEANOR Oliphant’s life is disturbingly predictable. She has spent the past eight years working as a finance clerk and she eats lunch alone, goes home alone and spends her weekends alone.
On Friday evening, she buys a bottle of Chianti and two bottles of vodka and makes them last the weekend “so that I’m neither drunk nor sober. Monday takes a long time to come around. My phone doesn’t ring often – it makes me jump when it does.”
Aside from work, where her surly, judgmental attitude makes her the office pariah, the only time she speaks to anyone else is on Wednesday evenings when she has a 10-minute telephone chat with Mummy. It’s not a conventional mother/daughter relationship. Mummy is in prison and thinks nothing of reducing Eleanor to tears with throwaway comments such as, “You’re a pointless waste of human tissue.”
Then in an office raffle Eleanor wins tickets to see local band Johnnie Rivers And The Pioneers. She develops an overwhelming crush on the singer and what better way to keep Mummy happy than settling down with Johnnie?
Eleanor sets about an intensive top-to-toe makeover, her abrasive social awkwardness and cluelessness making every encounter sparkle with humour. She is confident that handsome Johnnie won’t be put off by the unexplained “ridged, white contours of scar tissue that slither across my right cheek, starting at my temple and running all the way down to my chin”. In fact, she muses, how lucky she is to have found someone who understands how it feels to turn heads.
Then Raymond starts work in the I T department of Eleanor’s firm. One day she finds herself leaving work at the same time as Raymond who is making a futile attempt at small talk when they see an old man collapse on the pavement. “Leave him,” says Eleanor. “He’s drunk.” But Raymond runs to his side, an ambulance is called and the man, Sammy, is hospitalised.
Raymond and Eleanor find themselves reeled into the social circle of Sammy’s grateful family. Eleanor starts to develop the beginnings of a social life and the self-protective barrier she has worked so hard to build shows signs of beginning to crumble. And preoccupied though she is with her pursuit of Johnnie, Eleanor is surprised to find herself forming an unlikely friendship, the first of her life, with amiable, kindly Raymond.
Raymond is a brilliantly drawn anti-hero, “a poorly turned out computer repair man with a range of unfortunate social habits”, terrible dress sense (“A duffel coat! Surely they were the preserve of children and small bears?”) and he “wasn’t overweight but he was doughy and a bit paunchy”. And yet I’ll wager many readers end this book head over heels in love with Raymond.
However, when Eleanor’s crush on Johnnie reaches its inevitable denouement, she struggles to cope with the fallout. The novel takes a darker turn and we learn the truth about the horrific incident that derailed her life.
But at heart, this is a novel about Eleanor’s future. What an achievement to make the story of a woman who has suffered so much, who is appallingly scarred, mentally and physically, into such a joyful novel, brimming with humour and hope, with such faith in the power of love and friendship to rescue even the most damaged individuals.
This novel is deeply moving, relentlessly funny and its endearing characters are unforgettable. An absolute treat of a read from first page to last.