KINDRED SPIRITS
Erica Wagner savours a debut novel that rejoices in a friendship across the generations
The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot is a beautiful debut, funny, tender, and animated by a willingness to confront life’s obstacles and find a way to survive. What could be better right now? Its author is Marianne Cronin, who was toiling away in the foothills of academia when her novel was sold in 24 countries; it has already been optioned by Sony Pictures, and she’s only 30. ‘It all feels a bit like a dream,’ Cronin tells me. ‘I was working three jobs, not earning enough to pay my rent. It was like something from a cheesy film. I was completely dazed for a couple of months.’
The story begins in a hospital, the Glasgow Princess Royal. Lenni is 17 and is dying; her illness is never described, but the reader knows from the outset that it’s terminal. There, she meets the 83-year-old Margot, who is being treated for a heart condition. It is their unlikely friendship, their ages combining to make the century of the title, that powers the narrative, which stretches outside the confines of the hospital to encompass Lenni’s girlhood in Sweden and Margot’s whole existence. The book traces the course of their developing friendship, and tracks back and forth in time to show us both their lives. The reader sees them finding points of connection, culminating in a moment of extremity.
The voice of Lenni, Cronin tells me, ‘ just came out my head and I started writing’, although Lenni’s experience is based in part on a terminally ill girl she knew while she was at Lancaster University. ‘The day she died, I went to a big Tesco, and I thought: “No one here knows what happened to her.” It was just a normal day, for them. I wondered what it must be like to live with such an illness.’
When I ask why Lenni is Swedish, Cronin’s answer is that she just arrived that way, a nearly complete character. Cronin later learnt that the Swedish version of ‘Happy Birthday’ contains the line ‘May she live for a hundred years!’; it felt like a lucky discovery, a confirmation of her instinct. ‘I felt I’d won the lottery.’ Margot is much more than a cheery granny type: in creating her, Cronin had to confront her own ageism. ‘I wanted her to have a vibrant, controversial, exciting life. We’re not going to view her just as a sweet old lady.’ Through Margot’s own recollections, we meet her as a young woman, getting involved in an almostromantic entanglement with another woman perhaps more courageous than she is, and coping with a difficult marriage.
There is a sense of urgency about the friendship between this apparently ill-assorted couple. Both Lenni and Margot are in peril, and this is the source of their closeness. Some of Cronin’s own experience informs the sensitivity of her writing: in 2013, at a routine doctor’s appointment, she was found to have a resting heart rate of 200 beats per minute (a normal rate is between 60 and 100). ‘I had to have all these investigative appointments; I had this terrifying feeling of impending doom.’ She’s fine now, it should be said.
Cronin was also inspired by novels such as Rachel Joyce’s
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, another tale full of warmth that manages to look challenging topics straight in the eye. She was keen to find the right balance between joy and sorrow. ‘That was one of the reasons it took me so long to get it to a place where I thought people might want read it,’ she says. People all over the world will read it now, for it celebrates friendship, finds meaning in difficulty and lets the reader explore dark places while always allowing for the possibility of light. Lenni and Margot are fine companions for all our springtime journeys.
‘The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot’ by Marianne Cronin (£14.99, Doubleday) is published on 18 February.