RANDOM JOTTINGS

Angela Young very kindly sent me a copy of her first novel, Speaking of Love, which I read yesterday with great enjoyment. It is published by Beautiful Books and the production values certainly seem to reflect this name. It is printed on lovely thick paper, has an attractively patterned front and back fly leaf and an excellent jacket which, when removed, reveals an equally attractive silver grey book underneath with black lettering.  It also has an attached bookmark which makes life much easier all round and is a nice extra touch.

When the book starts we are introduced to Iris, who is taking part at a story telling Festival in Wales.  Iris has told stories all her life as had her mother who was killed tragically for which death she feels her father blames her.  She is unloved and lonely so it is hardly surprising that she falls in love with the first man who pays her any attention, Kit, a poet.  They run away together and have a daughter, Vivie.  They move into a cottage where they meet the next door neighbours and their young son Matthew, who becomes devoted to Vivie and imagines himself as her knight in shining armour.

Kit soon abandons his family and gradually Iris starts to exhibit signs that all is not well with her.  She hears voices and gradually become more and more incoherent and ill.  Vivie tries to hide this as long as possible, but eventually her mother is admitted to a psychiatric hospital and is diagnosed with schizophrenia although we do not discover this until much later.

Vivie distances herself from her mother as she is frightened of descending into madness herself and also feels that she has failed to help Iris sufficiently.  She cannot cope with her mother’s illness and, she too, marries the first man who can offer her security and comfort without realising that she has fallen in love with the idea of love, and not the man himself.

This is a novel about what happens when ‘people who love each other don’t say so’.  Iris’s father never told her he loved her until he was dying by which time it was too late to repair the damage he had caused. In her turn, Iris never told her daughter how she felt about her as she did not know how to say the words and so Vivie suffers as her mother did, feeling both worthless and unloved.  Matthew, loving Vivie, stands by and says nothing and watches her marry a man she does not love.

So we have three people all keeping silent about their feelings and suffering as a consequence.  Only by finally admitting their love can they  find any sort of happiness, which they do by the final page though it is not as cut and dried as I have made it sound.

I found this book absorbing and much appreciated the way events were slowly uncovered through the three separate narratives of Iris, Vivie and Matthew.  By this device the reader can understand each individual view and marry the events up together as we learn more and more the further we read.  Interspersed in the narratives are stories told by Iris each reflecting the dilemmas that she, Vivie and Matthew are facing, and I found the Tree Story, told by Iris at the Festival and which brings the story to a close, very moving.

At the front of the book there is a quote recorded by Angela Young’s grandmother in her commonplace book "You must take care of love; if not, it goes bad".

I look forward to reading Angela’s second novel very much indeed.