Jeremy Gavron searches for meaning from his mother’s suicide
● BOOK OF THE WEEK
A Woman On The Edge Of Time: A Son’s Search For His Mother by Jeremy Gavron is published in hardback by Scribe. ONE morning in December 1965, 29-year-old writer and mother-of-two Hannah Gavron dropped her youngest son off at nursery and drove to a friend’s flat in Primrose Hill, where she gassed herself. The author of A Woman On The Edge Of Time was that little boy who was at his nursery school and in this compelling memoir, he investigates why his mother, who seemed to have lived a life of gilded privilege and comfort, would do this.
Just two years before his mother’s suicide, Sylvia Plath, who also had two children, took her life in exactly the same way just one street away. Gavron suggests that they were both women on the edge of time – just a bit too young to benefit from the rise of feminism.
It wasn’t until he was 30 and clearing out his grandparents’ house that he learned the full truth from a newspaper cutting, that had his mother’s suicide note with the words, “Please tell the boys I love them terribly!”
In his almost exhaustive search for truth, Gavron uncovers an illegal relationship between Hannah and the headmaster of her boarding school, which began when she was just 14. She had bouts of depression and a lover, who was gay and whose rejection seemed to push her over the edge. A fascinating and beautiful read.
8/10 (Review by Georgina Rodgers)
● FICTION
The Edge Of The Fall by Kate Williams is published in hardback by Orion. IN The Edge of the Fall, author Kate Williams picks up the historical narrative centred on the Anglo-german de Witt family begun in The Storms Of War. Spanning the post-war period from 1919 to 1926, the novel traces the trials and tribulations of the de Witts, in particular youngest daughter Celia and eldest son Arthur, as they try to reestablish their lives after the war.
The arrival of their 16-year-old cousin Louisa offers a potential focus for Celia’s life, but it is Arthur who takes her under his wing before a tragic event that reverberates across the years.
Kate Williams has created a resonant and nuanced evocation of life in the aftermath of the First World War in which the shadows of the conflict loom large in peacetime. But her novel also explores the deep psychological and emotional worlds of the individual.
With its chronological and narrative span, this is very much the quintessence of a saga, but as the novel ends, it is clear that the saga is far from over and there are more than a couple of storylines that need resolving. Book two is just, it seems, the middle act.
7/10 (Review by Jade Craddock)
Number 11 by Jonathan Coe is published in hardback by Viking. AUTHOR Jonathan Coe introduced his readers to the ghastly Winshaw family in his 1994 novel What A Carve Up! Their satirical purpose was to embody all that was terrible about Britain during the Thatcher-major era, and they did so with such biting ferocity that the young author was awarded the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Prize the following year.
Now he’s at it again. Number 11 is his 11th novel and in a skilful dissection of all that is least attractive about life under Cameron and Osborne, we meet a new generation of the entitled, self-serving, over-privileged clan.
From the theatre of cruelty that is reality television, to food banks, social media, fatuous awards ceremonies and the impotence of political comedy, nothing escapes his baleful eye.
It’s brilliant and hugely entertaining. But on this evidence Coe is certainly a glass-half-empty sort of person, and his authorial voice is that of a grumpy old man.
6/10 (Review by Liz Ryan)
● NON-FICTION
Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam is published in hardback by Harpercollins. CARRYING Albert Home, the title says it all – a devoted husband and his discontented wife set off from West Virginia to Florida to take her pet alligator Albert home. It is absolutely barmy. No one seems even the slightest bit perturbed about the reptile in the back of the Buick.
A lifetime of adventures – meeting John Steinbeck, industrial rebellions, joining the coast guard and a hurricane, among others – are condensed into one epic journey. It’s utterly charming, exploring the ups and downs of love and marriage, and celebrating eccentricity.
Homer Hickam is an award-winning author, his own memoir Rocket Boys was a New York Times No 1 bestseller. Hickam’s own life has been as eventful (Vietnam veteran, coal miner, palaeontologist and NASA engineer) as that of his parents, whose, at times, bittersweet story is told so warmly here.
8/10 (Review by Rachel Farrow)
Orson Welles, Volume 3: One Man Band by Simon Callow is published in hardback by Jonathan Cape. THE third volume of Simon Callow’s titanic Orson Welles biography traces Welles’ life from Macbeth’s frosty reception in 1948 to his crowning glory of a noble failure, Chimes At Midnight, two decades later.
Welles left a daunting number of loose threads across as many mediums and continents as he could find, but Callow has a suitably kitchen sink approach, sources of staggering breadth and detail revealing a brilliant, sad, divisive figure: a boyish genius in constant search of Hollywood’s approval.
Eventually the urge to hurl advice at the pages (don’t take a film crew to Mexico on tourist visas!) subsides and we appreciate the genuine highs – especially Moby Dick, its production and whirlwind performance thrillingly conveyed – and suffer the myriad lows, project after project abandoned through problems of finance, personality, or the inescapable fact that there was only one Orson Welles. A biography as exhaustive and exhilarating as its subject.