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The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

The plot feels so very familiar. A murder in a Cambridge college, a strange sect around a charismatic academic, someone from the outside (in this case, Mariana, the aunt of the best friend of the victim) brought in to investigate, scraps of ancient Greek left as clues, a soupcon of the supernatural.

One thinks of Deborah Harkness, Donna Tartt, even the wonderful Amanda Cross (Death in a Tenured Position). However, somehow Michaelides doesn’t quite pull it off. It feels flat, the characters two-dimensional despite the forensic psychology aspect of the work.

Despite this, there are many great elements – the evocation of Cambridge. Michaelides really captures the feel of it. On occasions his sense of place is beautifully done – the trappings of the college, the wild areas around the river – plus there is a sense of the excitement of academia and campus love affairs – a heady mix of new thoughts and new feelings. But all this is fleeting and overlaid by a fairly unbelievable plot.

Michealides prefers to concentrate on the psychology, (of both classics lecturer Edward Fosca, whom Mariana suspects of the grisly, ritualistic murder of the undergraduate, and of the amateur detective Mariana herself, an alumnus of the College). Plus there are the cold, haughty ‘maidens’ of the title. Much more could have been made of these figures. The end result is characters that twist and turn to conform to Michaelides thesis at the expense of some sort of depth or consistency.

If you can go with it on the psych theory level, you might also be able to accept the final reveal but, to me, it was too far-fetched to be satisfying. There are much better novels in this genre, Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, for example.

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Best Audiobooks 2nd Quarter 2021

Square Haunting: Five women, freedom and London Between the Wars – Francesca Wade

Read by Corrie James

Running to 350 dense pages, I saved my eyes and listened to the audiobook. I did have to buy the paper book, though, for the photographs of the square and the five writers, intellectuals and feminists involved: H.D. (the poet), Dorothy L Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison (an anthropologist), Eileen Power (a historian) and Virginia Woolf, who all lived in Mecklenburgh Square, London (although not necessarily in the same time period).

The book is really five potted histories of these women, but it is all fascinating. The life of Virginia Woolf is well-known but I was interested in hearing about the lives of the other women.

At first, I felt Corries James’ narration was a bit thin and wavering, but I got used to it and enjoyed having this book read to me.

Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, a Marriage – Diane Middlebrook

Read by Bernadette Dunne

What a fantastic book this is. Perhaps we all think we know a bit too much about the relationship between Hughes and Plath but Middlebrook does a thorough, academically acute and emotionally intelligent analysis of the attraction (almost obsession) of the two and how their marriage influenced their respective work. Her critique of their poetry is excellent with enough quotes to makes me follow up and read the poems she refers to. I learnt so much and felt I was in competent and brilliant hands.

Bernadette Done is wonderful as narrator: assured, throaty, intelligent. You feel she is someone who would not be out of place at the Algonquin. A wonderful listening experience.

The Seven Doors – Agnes Ravatn

Charlotte Strevens

This is a taut, intellectual psychological thriller set in Norway. The main character, Nina, is a middle-aged literature professor, and when she is tangentially connected to the disappearance of the tenant in her and her husband’s rental house, she decides (as she suggests in an address she gives) that literature academics are better at solving crimes than the police, and accordingly sets out to find out what happened to the missing woman. The seven doors is a reference to the fairy tale of Bluebeard, and folklore, literary and psychological allusions make this a very satisfying read. Charlotte Strevens has just the right amount of Norwegian accent to give this flavour, and her dry, clear intonation suits Nina beautifully.

Witchmark CL Polk

Read by Samuel Roukin

Witchmark is set in an alternate world that has the flavour stylistically of the first world war. Our hero, Miles Singer, is the doctor at a hospital treating the war wounded. He has special healing powers that mark him as a witch, a sub-culture that is hunted down and consigned to asylums, so he has to keep his identity a secret. Miles is an honourable man in a dishonourable time. He reminded me somewhat of Nicolas Sayre from Garth Nix’s Abhorson books (wonderful audiobooks read by Tim Curry). Samual Roukin’s narration is just as wonderful – the sort of gentle, rich voice that it is a pleasure to be in the company of.

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The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey (held)

This is a quiet, meditative novel. Middle-aged Erica sells up her apartment in Sydney to live on the south coast of NSW (I had previously read Lohrey’s novel Vertigo set in Tasmania and for some reason this story felt more like Tasmania to me than NSW). She has moved to be closer to her son who is serving a long sentence at a nearby prison. She rents a beach shack and immediately feels at home there, so she buys it. (Another quibble, beach shacks, even the run down variety, are gold on the south coast and unlikely to be waiting around for a spur-of-the-moment purchaser). Nevertheless, Lohrey is wonderful at description and mood and setting, and the reader settles into the rhythm of a low key life with the protagonist. We get to know the neighbours as she does – there is no sentimentality here, even the likeable ones get a critical eye from Erica. Underneath what might be a simple account of a sea-change, is the pain of Erica’s guilt over, and estrangement from, her son. The son is particularly unapproachable and unsympathetic, and I thought this was a brave and, probably, realistic portrayal. Erica has to cop it, as most mothers would, and sit in silence with him during the prison visits.

The labyrinth of the title is Erica’s project to keep her busy, to occupy her thoughts and her hands. It harks back to a maze of her childhood in the grounds of a mental institution where her father was a doctor. A labyrinth, though, is not a maze and there is quite a bit of discussion around different designs, the philosophy behind it, etc. Enter Jerko, an illegal immigrant, and stone mason in an earlier life, who decides to help with the construction. Again, there is no sentimentality, Jerko is abrupt and stand-offish. Things happen slowly, they don’t build to anything much, dramas are, as often as not, internalised. The highlight for me was a wonderfully described storm that causes a backwash in the lagoon which sends floodwaters seeping into Erica’s shack.

This novel is a string of incidents and thoughts, following the rhythms of a life. As with all such narratives, it is the writing, the description, and the authorial voice that carries it. And Lohrey succeeds in this. There has been some suggestion that the structure and pace of the book is designed to imitate the labyrinth – the meditative pacing, the folding back on itself, the goal of achieving the centre and then retreating. If so, this aspect was somewhat lost on me, though I do concede there is a sense of taking life at a walking pace, looking around, and then moving on.

PS Lovely cover that induced me to buy the paper book.

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Best reads 2020

It is somewhat late for this but here are my best (and some worst) books for 2020.

Best Literary novel

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

I find it hard to pinpoint just what I loved about this short novel by the Polish Nobel laureate. Please don’t be put off by the title, it’s not about the holocaust, or massacres, unless you think we humans’ treatment of animals is something like that. It is not a grand book, it has a small canvas – an out of the way hamlet in rural Poland. The novel does have one of my pet loves, that is, a tough older woman taking on the (small) world. It is ostensibly a murder mystery as Janina’s neighbours start turning up dead. Janina takes it into her own head to find out what’s going on, amidst the snow and harsh conditions. Yeah, I can’t explain why I loved it but I just did.

Honourable mentions to The Inheritance of Loss by Kiren Desai, Madeline Miller’s wonderful Circe, Wolfe Island, as below, and My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell which is an interesting and brave take on complicity and abuse in a sexual relationship between a male teacher and female student.

Best Fantasy or speculative

A good year for this. I particularly enjoyed The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon as well as Skyward by Brandon Sanderson. I’ve never felt like reading his adult books but this children’s/YA one of a young aspiring female pilot, carrying the burden of her father’s cowardice in battle, and her talking ‘ship’, was well-written and absorbing.

I am an avid fan of Garth Nix and am currently rereading his ‘Abhorsen’ books (sigh, cry etc. etc.). His latest The Left-Handed Booksellers of London is a gem – set in the 80s, there is some great nostalgia for us who lived through it as young adults, plus the usual fantastic characters and dark plot.

 Best book with a tough woman protagonist

This is my find for 2020 – tough, older women not taking it anymore. As well as Olga Tokarscuk, there’s Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth who turns her gimlet eye on siblings and inheritance in Will and Testament and guilt, solitude, selfishness and art in A House in Norway. US writer Ottessa Moshfegh adopts a similar delicious tone in Death in Her Hands. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but I just love it.

Best audiobook

A good book can be ruined by the wrong narrator/performer but the right one can bring so much out in a book I otherwise might not have read. Abbe Holmes’ southern drawl in Wolfe Island gave resonance to the protagonist, the wonderful dry, tough, Kitty Hawke, I loved it. The crisp British tones of Sophie Aldred makes her one of my favourite narrators and she didn’t disappoint in Skyward. I don’t know if I would have picked up the paper version of Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, but having it narrated to be by Anna-Maria Nabirye made it a pleasure. Jenny Agata couldn’t have been more perfect for Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels.

Book that doesn’t deserve the hype

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

I guess you can’t get more hyped than being short-listed for the Booker prize (besides winning it). The Shadow King certainly garnered a lot of accolades with reveiwers often viewing it as affirmation of women as the author references in an afterword, her great-grandmother who fought against the invasion of Ethiopia by the Italian fascists. However, if the novel is supposed to be ‘an exploration of female power, it’s a depressing portrayal. Rather than being about the rewards of rebellion, the competency of women fighting alongside men, it is more about the ‘fog of war’, its ugliness, the viciousness of fascism, and who suffers the most – the poor, the third world, the women. We see women (and the protagonist, Hirut, in particular) used, abused, raped, taken for granted and dismissed.

I found the novel to be so overwritten, so consciously oblique, that for much of its length I had a hard time working out what was actually happening. For its popularity, I can only conclude that many people have read into this book what they want it to say. Its elusiveness and opacity allow for this.

Most objectionable book

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

I didn’t like the treatment of women in this. It’s a long dry, cerebral work. No one seems to care what happens to Yasuko, the main female character who is in fear of her ex-husband, or about her fourteen-year-old daughter. We are supposed to care about the fate of Yasuko’s next-door neighbour (male) who helps her out. As long as the detective (male) and his mathematics professor sidekick (male) resolve the fiendishly clever ‘problem’, that’s all that matters. For crime to be satisfying, it’s not just about puzzle-solving, it’s about justice, and I don’t mean merely in the legal sense.

Guilty comfort reads

I loved  Sujata Massey’s recent crime novels set in 1920s India – The Widows of Malabar Hill and The Satapur Moonstone so I sought out her backlist of crime novels of 1980s Japan. Rei Shamura is half-Japanese half-American and trying to start up a business as an antiques consultant in Tokyo. Although they are  light crime investigations with an edge of romance, Massey is more serious about exploring aspects of Japanese life and culture from an outsider’s perspective (Rei is never allowed to forget she’s not a proper Japanese). They are a lot of fun and cover aspects such as Buddhism, the history of kimono, flowering arranging etc.

Best Australian books 

Wolfe Island and Heather Rose’s Bruny. It might be far-fetched in places, but she goes right in there with her take on corruption and politics in the Apple Isle, and a prodigal daughter with secrets of her own – a lot of fun.

Best crime 

Not a great year for this but I enjoyed, admired and respected Dorothy L Sayers’ Nine Tailors. On a lesser plane, but nevertheless enjoyable was Lucy Atkins’ Oxford-set Magpie Lane. Anthony Horowitz’s Moonflowers Murders was devilishly clever with a full crime novel contained within the crime novel. I take my hat off to him.

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Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens

I would have found this an interesting, absorbing, affecting novel if Crawdads had continued on as it started – a tale of a lonely, abandoned ‘marsh girl’ who channels her love and interest into nature rather than humans (who have so betrayed her). Owens’ history as a naturalist shines through in the wonderful descriptions of the watery marshlands of North Carolina (which we now call wetlands, recognising their diversity and importance). While it is perhaps hard to believe in young Kya as a total autodidact (she attends school for only one day), her salvation is the study of the environment around her.

I was taken by the idea of seven-year-old Kya learning to live on her own in a shack on the water, scraping together just enough food to keep herself going, befriending seabirds, dodging truant officers, and having to be tamed into a tentative friendship by Tate, a boy a couple of years older  who can see past the small town’s prejudice against the ‘white trash’ who live marginal lives in and around the waterways.

However, woven in with this initial story, is the suspicious death some fifteen years later of well-off, tear-away town-boy Chase who has fallen from a watchtower. Just how Kya is linked to this death is the trajectory the novel takes, and this is where, to my mind, it strays into genre fiction territory. I can only think that Owens thought there was just not enough in the story of Kya overcoming odds to become accepted in society and to live her life as a successful naturalist. The phenomenal success of the book probably proves her right, but there is something terribly wrong with the denouement of the novel.

The final twist is a betrayal of the reader. (Spoiler below) For a novel to be successful it has to have an internal consistency. Owens goes to some lengths to develop Kya as a character – she is hurt and betrayed but she overcomes this, she finds friends and allies. She matures and is essentially a good, independent person. For the final twist to work we must believe [that she planned an elaborate murder, she was able to lure Chase, who last we saw she’d punched and kicked after he raped her, to the watchtower at a particular time, that she was able to concoct disguises with no one twigging it, that in a tiny town they actually had buses running at night, that somehow she either had the red wool hat with her, or went home to get it, or that the fibres were left on Chase’s jacket from years before, that even though she only had twenty minutes to do the whole thing she removed footprints in the dark including Chase’s which if she was so clever she would have left. We also have to accept that she wrote a poem about the killing and kept the tell-tale shell necklace in a hiding place in the shack (although the sheriff thoroughly searched it) for poor Tate to find after her death. Why? She hated Chase, why would she keep the necklace?

And the final betrayal that is totally out of character is Kya accepting the support of her ‘friends’ (Jumpin, Mabel, Tate, Tate’s dad, her editor). The reader feels good about their loyalty to Kya in court, the way they stand by her as she professes her innocence, when all the while their support is betrayed. That is not the behaviour of the Kya we know – she committed the murder, she would either have admitted it, or she would have never been caught, disappearing into the marsh back to a lonely, isolated life.

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Last Night by James Salter

This story was someone’s suggestion for a perfect short story. It was published in the New Yorker in 2002. It begins with a translator, Walter Such, at home in his lounge room with a guest, Susanna, having a drink. His wife, Marit, comes downstairs in a red evening dress ‘in which she had always been seductive, with her loose breasts and sleek, dark hair’. She asks for a drink too. It transpires that Marit is sick and, as the group talks in a desultory way, ominously the narrators tell us, ‘It was the night they had decided would be the one’.

Immediately a tension is set up and the rest of the night (they are going out for a last meal) builds in the light of this revelation – most poignantly, Marit noting the beautiful night sky on the drive home: ‘The wind was moving in the tops of the shadowy trees. In the night sky there were brilliant blue clouds, shining as if in daylight’. Perhaps the reader is a little surprised at the presence of Susanna, a ‘family friend’ who is only twenty-nine and wearing a ‘short skirt’, but we push this to the back of our minds. Salter is very good at describing Walter’s nervousness and difficulty in bringing himself to give Marit the fatal injection of morphine and there is the wonderful line: ‘Now he had slipped her, as in a burial at sea, beneath the flow of time’. At this stage we are in a sad, emotional place.

This could have just been a story about euthanasia, but the Salter does something I’ve noted before in short story writers; he twists the story to make it something else. Walter comes downstairs after the deed, after he has kissed his wife’s hand farewell, and goes to find Susanna. Although she resists being seduced at that time, Walter ‘devoured her, shuddering as if in fright at the end and holding her to him tightly’. They had been having an affair.

The next morning, they are having breakfast when they hear a footstep on the stairs. Marit appears saying to Walter ‘something went wrong … I thought you were going to help me’. A coda tells us that that was the last time Walter and Susanna were together. We are left to wonder whether Marit devised the whole thing to expose Walter, certainly the decision to invite Susanna to be there on the night of the euthanasia (Marit’s decision) suggests this.

As with some ‘twist’ stories, I felt a little manipulated by this one. The reader is led into the poignancy of the initial situation. We get a little of Marit’s backstory and empathise with the emotiveness of her last thoughts, looking around her house, the things that she would see for the last time, the world moving on and she not in it. Then, Marit is diminished in our eyes, if indeed she has devised a cruel revenge on Walter. Marit does indeed have terminal cancer, so whatever revenge she gets can’t mean much. I was left annoyed with this story. Yes, it is clever, but the emotional resonance is cheapened by the cleverness.

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A House in Norway by Vigdis Hjorth

Alma is a middle-aged textile artist living by herself near the sea in a picturesque part of Norway. To help with her finances, she rents out an annex to her house. She lets the annex to a young Polish woman, her boyfriend and young child. To begin with she prides herself on being broad-minded, happy to rent the place out to low-wage people with perhaps a tenuous legal status, but she can’t quite live up to this. She needs the rent but she doesn’t really want to share her space with strangers – the fact that the Polish woman can’t speak Norwegian, doesn’t help, especially when the woman is the victim of domestic violence and the boyfriend breadwinner moves out. Alma comes to a new rental agreement with the woman with the social services involved.  Alma gets slightly annoyed when officialdom takes the side of “the Pole”, as she calls her, although it’s Alma’s house.

Vigdis Hjorth is very good at doing low-level conflict. In her later novel Will and Testament, it is between siblings over the wills of their parents. Alma is not a bad person, in fact she’s funny and a serious creative, but certain things such as the Polish woman running radiators at full bore, while Alma herself is parsimonious and pays the electricity bills, drives her mad. Alongside the growing tension between the two women, Alma muses over her tapestries such as one for her old school and one for the Constitutional committee for a Norwegian anniversary. I found the description of the creative process and how ideas are worked up into creative pieces to be totally absorbing, no mean feat.

Alma is aware of her privileged position vis-à-vis her Polish tenant who works as a cleaner and is a single mother (Alma is divorced and has grown-up children) yet there is an almost insurmountable barrier between them. Alma reflects on what the Pole must think of her – half-drunk, sleep-deprived when working on her commissions, a haphazard housekeeper while the Pole keeps the annex neat as a pin, although overstuffed with gee-gaws, to Alma’s distain.

Things come to a head when the Pole’s husband returns from prison and, after ignoring Alma or putting up with her, Slawomira (as we find out the Pole is called) begins to fight back. Alma has based her Constitutional tapestry on a nineteenth century story she’d read about a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage who runs away and is caught and sent to an asylum where she commits suicide. Again, Hjorth does a great job of showing us Alma’s thought process here and how she converts it to a visual work. As Alma becomes frantic about making her deadline and what the Poles might do next, the themes of the book coalesce. I loved Alma. I related to her angst, her self-reliance, her will to be generous and her justifications for not being, her nice line in self-mockery. She’s messy and fallible. Hjorth’s enjoyable deadpan narration keeps what is a fairly slight story, in plot terms, bubbling along.

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Short Story – Making Stuff Up

Making Stuff Up by KW George

Big Issue Fiction Edition 2019

It’s one of the tropes of fiction writers to write a story about writing a story. This can be done in a metafictional way where the author/narrator steps out of the narrative to show themselves writing it or, as here, it can be a story about a writer trying to write.

George begins her story with her first-person narrator, chatting online with her writing group about an American author, FJ Aden who is in the news because he’s made up things about his own life which aren’t true (this seems to be based on AJ Finn’s confessions). The group discuss whether this matters, and whether or not they’d read this author’s works after the scandal. Our narrator muses that the writing group is supposed to be about their own writing and that it often descends into gossip and chat.

She’s spent so long online that she’s late for making dinner (her husband works in an office all day). There is a slight tension between them because, they are supposed to have given up alcohol for the month and the husband wants a beer. He takes off to get some low alcohol beer from the supermarket and she wanders into her study where she’s hidden a bottle of wine.

For the rest of the night she muses about Aden, who she’d originally defended, saying what’s the difference between making things up in fiction to sell and making things up about your real life? Now she thinks, what does he really know when he described his mother supposedly dying from cancer? Our narrator, it transpires, has experienced chemotherapy and had a mastectomy.

In the morning, she tries to open up a document of the writing she’d done the day before but there’s only a blank page – she’s convinced herself she had actually started on the story she’s trying to write. Here we get a metafictional bit when she recounts to us the idea she has for this story. A man, a bit like her husband, is interested in a woman at the office who he meets in the lift: she’s well-dressed but wearing a necklace of paperclips. His wife, at home, notices ‘he misses her mouth when he bends down to kiss her hello when he gets home from work’.

Then our narrator’s mother rings, breaking into her thoughts, and tells her about a yeti documentary she’s watched – supposedly factual, but of course it must be ‘made up’ to some extent. In the last paragraph our narrator says, now she knows how to end her story – ‘My Lara character needs to have a Mum … who confirms it’s bizarre to … find … a handful of paperclips in your husband’s suit pocket …’

‘Making Stuff Up’ is the type of story that relies on the voice to carry it and George’s narrator is an engaging one. I like that it is a story about writing a story and the extent to which a writer can mine their own life for material. The narrator can identify with Aden because (as we find out in the last para) she is using something personal to ‘make up’ something that might hurt her husband, while at the same time lying about her drinking (which is another type of ‘making something up’). I wasn’t quite convinced about the intervention of the mother and why her mother’s swallowing of the yeti story should convince the narrator about the validity of the paperclip/affair aspect to her story.

Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable short story, covering some interesting ideas with a light touch.

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Short story – Bushfire by Kate Grenville

Bushfire – Kate Grenville

Something Special, Something Rare – Black Inc

Despite its title, ‘Bushfire’ is not predominantly about a bushfire, it is a relationship story, a love story. The fire does appear, however, in the second paragraph: ‘brown smoke hid the contours of the hills over in the distance and smudged the sky. After a term in Mindurra Public school, she had got used to seeing the hills … It was unsettling to have lost them now.’

We are thus introduced to our focalising character, Louise, an outsider to the small town. Louise has walked into town to see if she can volunteer to help with the firefighting but not being particularly useful, she’s sent off to make sandwiches. On her way to the hall, she glimpses a man on a fire truck ‘half-hidden among hoses and tanks’. He lifts a hand in greeting but she is taken by surprise and ‘by the time she waved back, the truck had gone’. We are then given a flashback when Louise recalls the time at a town fair when a busybody intending to matchmake had got the man, Lloyd, to bring her a cup of tea, and then ensues an awkward conversation between them. Again, Louise seems out of synch: although Lloyd blurts out some information about himself, she can’t manage to engage with him – ‘Yes, she’d managed to say, feeling the startled look on her face, hearing it in her voice’. She observes, fascinated, as a blush spreads over Lloyd’s face and neck, and then, to her own discomfiture, she begins to blush herself: ‘It was as if her skin and his were having a conversation with each other, all by themselves’.

This image tells the reader something that Louise only slowly works out for herself as she makes the sandwiches.

A man comes into the refreshment hall from the fires, panicked and excited, and this brings us back to the moment of fear and tension and Louise sees that something she thought mundane about Lloyd might be a ‘kind of heroism’. There is then a flashback to one of Louise’s ex-husbands a survivalist type who said if they were separated, he would meet her on the steps of the Gunnedah post office. She reflects sardonically, that he was ‘not the type of man she would want to find’. This train of thought leads her back to Lloyd and the missed opportunity of her conversation with him that the fire has brought into focus: ‘he would not be burned alive. He would come back down’. The last sentence of the story harks back to the blushing incident and places it at the centre of the meaning of the narrative – ‘perhaps they could continue the conversation that their skins … had already begun’.

This is a charming story that shows Grenville’s ear for human frailty, and for the foibles of quiet, overlooked people. The bushfire is a device that brings the mishandled and awkward meeting between the main characters into focus, and gives it a time imperative. The device of the blush device that has their two bodies ‘talking to each other’ works well, and the heat in their faces links in to the heat of the fires. Like the fire it can either overrun them, or the wind can change and it could go off in another direction.

This story was first published in The Bulletin and in Best Australian Stories 2000.

When reading it, I was reminded that one of my favourite novels is Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection (recently reissued by Text) which has a similar mismatched couple at its core.

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Short Story – Peeling

I am intending to read and critique a series of short stories to see how they work, and succeed and/or fail. I will examine the whole of the story, including the ending. Fair warning to read the story first, starting here with an unusual story by Peter Carey from 2010.

Peeling – Peter Carey

Meanjin Summer 2010

This is written from the point of view of an elderly male living alone in a room of, perhaps, a boarding house. He tells us of his interest in a woman who lives above him – contemplating her movements, his slow interest in getting to know her, but not too fast. There is a certain creepiness in this attention and voyeurism (the woman is younger and possibly vulnerable). She collects dolls that she de-hairs, pokes their eyes out and paints white. For the first half of this story, I thought it was about getting into the mind of a predator, that the ‘peeling’ of the title was really about him slowly revealing himself to us while he thinks he is exposing and defining the woman. From here, however, Carey twists the narrative as the woman begins to speak and reveal herself to the narrator (much to his annoyance as he desires to reveal her himself). At this point, we find out the woman assists with backyard abortions and this has disturbed her (hence the mutilated, purified dolls). As the narrator disrobes the woman (with her consent), she is peeled away: first clothes, then skin, then gender, then age, then identity as she disintegrates into a tiny shell-like, broken doll.

Carey shows total control of narrative, character, scene, language, as you would expect. If I were writing this story, I would probably have finished it at the half-way mark and made it more about exploration of character, but Carey pushes it further to give it that bizarre twist, and thus an additional metaphorical layer. This does make the reader sit back and consider ‘what does this mean?’ ‘what is he saying?’ but, to me, I thought it was taking it too far – the inherent interest we have in the situation as ‘real’ is wrenched around as we are given further ideas of  ‘peeling’, further ‘layers’ that we weren’t expecting.