My Old Sweetheart by Susanna Moore & What Lies Between Us by Nayomi Munaweera
There is a similarity in these novels, although one was written in 1982 and the other is 2016. Moore’s novel is set in lush, tropical Hawaii and is centred on a young, uncertain teenage girl, Lily. Lily’s mother is beautiful but prey to bouts of mania and depression, and Lily’s father, Sheridan, a doctor at the local hospital (and also a wealthy plantation owner) is remote. Of course Lily and her sister and brother always take their dreamy, wilful, imaginative mother’s side against their father. Munaweera’s novel likewise has a heady, exotic setting: this time Sri Lanka. We meet the narrator as a young girl; her mother is also beautiful, but like Lily’s mother she is never confident in her marriage as she comes from a lower social cast than her husband. The father, here, is similarly remote: a university professor this time, and also independently wealthy so that he gets his way, cloistered in his study, while mother and daughter bend to his will.
In both novels we see the parents through the daughter’s eyes – and the lens is coloured. They see their parents as are remote, quixotic, unpredictable, perhaps even dangerous. Not surprisingly the girls look elsewhere for companionship: Lily with a Japanese boy, Tosi, informally adopted by Sheridan but who acts as a servant, and the girl in “What Lies Between Us”, with a yard boy, Samson, as she follows him around in the burgeoning garden and watches as he cleans the pond slick with lilies and fish. Both author’s reveal a love for the beauty of their tropical childhoods, and the descriptions are evocative and ravishing.
However, and not unexpectedly, there is trouble in paradise (in fact the girls are never at ease and this sense heightens the sights, smells, sounds of their lush islands). The danger and thrill surrounding Lily’s mother, Anna, is beautifully suggested in an early scene where the family, sans, father, swims out to an underwater cave. Only Lily dives under the water, following her mother, into the dark entrance and it is Lily who has to remind her that they should return before the tide is too high and they are cut off. In the case of Munaweera’s heroine, tragedy strikes in a drastically-described rainstorm, with a wild and rising river and its suggestive undercurrents. She is quickly packed off to a new life America where a suppressed memory ticks away waiting or its incendiary moment. Lily also faces a tragedy in which she is unwittingly a contributor, and she also becomes an exile, flitting from place to place, island to island, with her young daughter, and the faithful Tosi in tow. (If you are wondering, ‘my old sweetheart’ is the mother’s term of affection for Lily).
There is an languor and sadness about Susanna Moore’s novel; perhaps there is a suggestion of colonial guilt, there is certainly a sense of personal guilt, but this is all played out in a dreamy sort of way that reminded me of those other wonderful tropical novels ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ by Jean Rhys and Richard Hughes’s ‘High Wind in Jamaica’. There are no neat solutions, just small victories, small moves forward, redolent regret.
Munaweera’s novel fell away for me when the narrative moved to America – while the narrator’s relationship, and having a child, is well-described, I just wasn’t very interested in it. The author shapes the story as a mystery/thriller as we know from the beginning that the narrator has committed some sort of unforgivable crime. I felt this imposed a rigid structure on something that could have flowed more naturally and more organically