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Remembering the Bones

Not going to London to visit the Queen

Frances Itani
Sceptre, 283pp, £17.99,

Anita Brookner

Tuesday, 18th March 2008

Anita Brooker on the new novel by Frances Itani

We know, or are familiar with, her background. Wilna Creek is very like Alice Munro’s Walley, and growing up there was without incident. The memory is benign, as is her survey of her more recent past. She married, had a much loved daughter whom she knows she is unlikely to see again, and reminds herself that she must write to the Queen apologising for her absence. The end is all too predictable, but the preceding interval is something of a state of grace, and here the virtues of the writer and her style are most pronounced. This is a novel without pretensions, likely to appeal to any reader who values calm and plausibility — values too often lacking in contemporary fiction, with its reliance on novelty or the wilder shores of dysfunction. Its accent on memory and the names of the bones articulate a story which might so easily have become morbid, but which remains on the side of sanity throughout — no mean feat, as the accent on approaching death is unavoidable.

Her story, which fills the main body of the narrative, is essentially a tragic one but is recounted without sentimentality. Her husband developed polio on their honeymoon, and her attempts to drag him to the bus depot and thence home are truly frightening. A baby son died at five months. And yet love somehow survived, although her husband remained secretive and partly disabled. His own story is equally tragic: an orphan, sent from England to Canada, a virtual slave labourer on a farm, he is the true victim. Georgina herself refuses victimhood. Throughout, she remains an ordinary woman, with an ordinary woman’s perceptions. And yet the story is not ordinary; far from it. What is remarkable about it is the uninflected realism with which it is recounted, that and the stoic resignation that informs it.

This is presumably a woman’s book, unlikely to appeal to a male readership. But its appeal to women is unmistakable, not only in its domestic detail but in its recognisable familiarity. Even the most emancipated of readers will appreciate its old-fashioned seemliness, its avoidance of gross emotional and sexual explicitness, its aversion to offensive language. In this respect it remains true to a recognisable tradition, without in any way making claims or citing precedents — no small accomplishment in an age of loud and discordant voices.