Jane Rusbridge

This is a curious novel – by a woman and about women. I picked it up for its setting in Sussex and the background theme to do with the immediately pre-Norman kings Canute and Harold. And the prologue is set there; and the coda the haunting hunting or the remains of the decapitated Harold by his long-time lover and his mother. But between these scenes we fall into the novel proper with Nora and her querulous mother, Ada.

For the first quarter of the novel, I thought it might be about a woman is mental disturbed and that the author similarly was. But I’ll leave that up in the air. I am a male – a gay male – and nudging 75 years. Along with and perhaps a might better than Virginia Wolff in her brilliant ‘To the Lighthouse’ this novel is revelatory. At the quarter mark the Canute and Harold part come in and there is then an interplay between the present and Nora and Ada’s lives. In the end, for me, this was a novel of the temperament, intelligence, disposition and view within the experience of women and of their world and the place they see men, as an add on, in it. And that vision; that cognisant knowledge of the world and of men in it , I’d have to say, is utterly different to how men experience the world and also how men think women experience reality.

To that end I hope more men might read this novel.… (meer)