Haunting memories

This week’s bookcase includes reviews of Smile by Roddy Doyle, The Wardrobe Mistress by Patrick McGrath and The Choice by Edith Eger.

THE WARDROBE MISTRESS

This latest novel from the author of Asylum and Spider is set in the freezing, fog-bound austerity of 1947 London. We open on the funeral of Charlie “Gricey” Grice, one of the great actors of his day, and pan across our key players – his widow Joan, a theatre wardrobe mistress; his daughter Vera, an exceptional if troubled actor; and Vera’s mysterious husband, the theatre impresario Julian Glass. Not long after her husband’s death, Joan begins a complicated friendship with Charlie’s understudy for Malvolio in Twelfth Night, his final role. The quietly ambitious Frank Stone had studied Gricey’s performance so well that his impersonation seems to Joan like possession. Joan starts to tailor Charlie’s clothes for Frank, delving into her husband’s voluminous wardrobe. But as intimacy grows, Joan – a Jew – makes

the odious discovery her husband was a fascist sympathiser.

SMILE

The Booker Prize-winning author leaves a portion of his trademark humour at the door in this tale of middle-age malaise and resurfacing childhood trauma. After separating from his wife, Victor Forde is back living alone in the neighbourhood where he once went to school – in the 1960s, under the Christian Brothers regime that would years later deliver Ireland one of its darkest abuse scandals. It is a chance meeting, in his new local, with a man purporting to be an old classmate, that sends Victor down the road of recalling his experiences at the hands of the Brothers. Then follow his lighter memories of life as a shock-jock journalist and smitten husband of a celebrity TV chef.

THE CHOICE

The author was rescued from a death march by American troops in 1945, but it was years before she was finally free. Pulled halfalive from a pile of corpses, and thrust into post-war recovery, Eger, a Hungarian Jew, is haunted by memories of the Holocaust and a devastating guilt that shackles her for far longer than her wartime incarceration. The innocent utterance of one word over another by the teenager helps seal the fate of her mother, sent upon arrival to Auschwitz to the gas chambers, while the aspiring gymnast and her sister are spared. It is this split-second choice – revealed at the memoir’s close – that traps Eger, now a trained psychologist, within her own mind. Returning to the site of her loss decades later, and even visiting Hitler’s former mountain retreat, Eger comes to accept her past, refusing to let Hitler claim her life too.

THE RESURRECTION OF JOAN ASHBY

This is the debut novel from the American writer, lawyer and film producer, but she knows what she’s doing. It tells of author Joan Ashby, who puts her life’s passion of writing on hold when she unexpectedly falls in love and gives birth to two boys. Wolas gives an alternative perspective on motherhood to one we normally see in literature. Joan is a strong central character battling her dual lives as an author and a mother, and Wolas recognises she’s under no obligation to unconditionally love her children.