Solving mysteries of dementia
by Joanna Cannon (The Borough Press, £14.99) FLORENCE CLAYBOURNE, 84, has had a fall. As she lies on the floor of her sheltered accommodation, pondering who will come to her aid, she wonders whether she will take her decades-old secret to her grave.
That secret was dredged up when a new resident named Gabriel Price moved into Cherry Tree Home For The Elderly. Florence might suffer from dementia but she has no doubt that this is not Gabriel Price but Ronnie Butler, a man she believed, and hoped, had drowned 60 years ago.
Florence is terrified of this elderly man, her fears setting up the central mystery of the novel. “Sometimes, you go through an experience in life that slices into the very bones of who you are, and two different versions of yourself will always sit either side of it like bookends.” Who is Ronnie, what is his history with Florence and why does he start to quietly persecute her? And how can Florence unravel the truth when her memory is failing her?
It is Florence’s lifelong friend Elsie who, with fellow resident Jack, joins her on a quest to fill the gaps in her memory and work out exactly who “Gabriel Price” is.
First Jack’s son drives the trio around the area to see what their remaining friends remember about their formative years. When the trail points them towards Whitby they lobby for a Cherry Tree trip to the seaside. There, Florence makes sense of her past and of her present too.
The second novel from the author of The Trouble With Goats And Sheep is a celebration of humanity and the love, loyalty and longing that defines it, written by an author of touching sensitivity and insight, her affection for her characters shining through every sentence.
Florence reflects upon the way people visit sanitised versions of the past (“Scenes were sandpapered down to make them easier to hold”). And youth is of course wasted on the young. If she and Elsie had known how old age would feel, “Perhaps we would have danced through our youth a little more slowly”.
Nor does Cannon shy away from the more harrowing aspects of old age. In the local care home, Florence tries to match the tormented people glimpsed in each room with the photos of their younger selves on the walls, “smiling back at me from their black-and-white lives”. The day Florence leaves her home to move to Cherry Tree is heartbreaking. But the novel’s endearing characters will make you laugh more often than you cry.
Above all, we are urged to forgive ourselves for the mistakes we make during our lifetimes. “Every one of us is damaged. We need the faults, the breaks, the fracture lines… However else would all the light get in?”