'Let me tell you something. If you wanted to curse
someone, I don't know why you would, but if you did, if you wanted to make
their life hard, if you wanted to make them as vulnerable to grief as possible,
I reckon you could do a lot worse than make them a woman in a house of men.'
These compelling lines open Owen Sheers' recent
novella, White Ravens. Eerily, this could just as easily be the opening
to a book I read immediately before it, Lionel Shriver's A Perfectly
Good Family. Both novels focus on the plight of a young woman with two
brothers, and the pain that these three siblings cause each other when the
brothers force her to choose between them; and hence, both novels hark back to
a third story, the plot that Sheers consciously bases his novel on; the story
of Branwen, daughter of Llyr, which forms the
second branch of the Mabinogion.
I have to say that I was disappointed by Sheers'
retelling, which forms part of a sequence of modern retellings of stories from
the Mabinogion, an initative from small press Seren which mirrors
Canongate's fabulous Myths series. I thought his Resistance and The
Dust Diaries were fantastic, but the quality of his writing was not as much
in evidence here, except in the early portion of the novella, which is narrated
by Rhian, a young Welsh woman who has recently abandoned both her brothers
after a lifetime of loyalty. She never expected to do this, Rhian explains, but
after an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease led to the shooting of all of their
sheep, her brothers turned to a bloodier trade which she can no longer
countenance. Like modern-day border men, they have taken to stealing sheep from
other farms, locking them into a van, slaughtering them en route to London, and
selling the fresh meat to high-class restaurants.
In this lopsided reflection
of the famous cauldron in Branwen's story, I thought Sheers had done something
quite wonderful; Rhian's voice, as is evident from the opening paragraph, is
utterly convincing, and the imagery as memorable as the original Celtic myth of
reattaching limbs and reanimating bodies. There are shades of the opening story, 'Butcher's Perfume', in Sarah Hall’s engrossing collection, The Beautiful Indifference, here. Unfortunately, he then switches – through the
device of an old man that Rhian encounters outside the Tower of London – to a
much less convincing straightforward retelling of the story, despite his
assertion in the afterword that ‘I knew I
didn’t want to faithfully hit every beat of the original.’ Nor should he;
the power of such stories cannot be exactly reproduced in this day and age,
when casual violence evokes very different responses, and his attempt to put
the pieces of the Branwen tale together is clumsy, despite brilliant touches
such as the weaving in of the legend of the ravens in the Tower (if they leave,
England will fall). At times, it reads as if it was written in a rush,
especially when it comes to dialogue, when one character, Ben, is used
frequently to awkwardly gloss the novella: “We
keep telling them [the Mabinogion stories] like, in different ways, but they’re still the same. An’ I reckon
they’ll go on being so til’ we learn from ‘em.” Yes, I wanted to say, I get
it; what next?
The reader could do worse than to turn to Lionel
Shriver’s caustic exploration of family dynamics, A Perfectly Good Family. Corlis grew up as the middle child and the
only girl, and sided with her ‘good’ younger brother Truman once he was old
enough to assert a claim on her. However, now her ‘bad’ older brother Mordecai
is back, to stake a claim on their family home after her mother’s death. Corlis
can choose, once again, to side with Truman or with Mordecai, and implicitly,
with her conventional desires or her risky impulses. What could have become a
dull, small-scale narrative turns, in Shriver’s hands, into something rather
fascinating. The touch of genius is the introduction of a ‘fourth child’ – the
ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] and the revelation that their parents
have willed a quarter of their estate to this organisation. This switches the
dynamic from a black-and-white struggle between Truman and Mordecai to a much
subtler exploration of this ‘normal family.’ For Corlis, the ultimate metaphor
for her mother’s life is their giant freezer, where she stored remnants of
meals that nobody liked at the time for much longer than they would ever keep,
and it is cathartic to clear this out after her mother’s death: ‘I had started hacking at the ice murals of
dinner we didn’t finish... wondering if the impulse wasn’t to save most what
you never really had in the first place...Oh, she’d saved all right, but saved
what? A life of freezing. That was what my mother did. She froze.’
As Corlis explains, her mother was so afraid of
losing anything good in her life that she started to turn it into a memorial
before it was even over – hence, the many holidays she remembers when her
mother would exclaim, “Aren’t we having a
wonderful time!” – and this permanently damaged her relationship with her
husband, a stickler for protocol who refused to give in even over the most
trivial matters. Shriver is wonderfully observant on the minutae of life.
Truman’s joy in buying new things, as if he has scored a moral victory by using
up the soap or toothpaste, Corlis’s duplicity in adopting different personas as
she moves between the brothers – ‘They
have completely different sisters’ – and Mordecai’s triumph in securing a
bank loan through utter blagging, are beautifully skewered. Again, I wondered
if the ending of this novel, as with Checker
and the Derailleurs, wasn’t a little too upbeat, and it’s hard to see an
older Shriver letting it pass. The extreme rifts within the family seem to
vanish very quickly – and Shriver is also guilty of using the all-too-common
trope of ‘character improvement through sudden disablement’, when it seems much
more likely that a man like Mordecai would become increasingly embittered.
Still, this novel is a joy to read for its fresh perspective on family life,
and I’d recommend it as heartily as any of Shriver’s work.