I have just been reading Eve Green by Susan Fletcher, which I found while browsing the library shelves.
It reminded me a little of Ruth Rendell’s The Crocodile Bird – a book which I never managed to finish - probably because that was another story about a young girl & her lone mother in rural isolation.
But Eve Green is a good read, even though it is a tale about a child who disappeared, & in the end the plot did not quite convince me - the elements of knowing manipulativeness & wilful disobedience did not quite gel. But the poetic evocation of childhood on a farm in rural Wales reminded me so much of my own in similar surroundings – though I hate cow parsley.
It came as a bit of a shock therefore to realise that the little girl’s grandparents were the same age as my parents, & so her mother could have been my little sister & Eve Green could have been my daughter. And that Susan Fletcher is only in her twenties.
It seemed odd; there is such a tendency to identify with the heroine of a book you are reading; somehow there seems something not quite right about doing this when the writer is so young now – it is not a problem when reading Jane Austen for example.
By coincidence I am having another long pull at another astonishing achievement by a writer in their twenties – John Stubbs Life of John Donne.
I am reading this in instalments because I want to pause, to savour it, rather than just run through. So far, at least, it seems the most sympathetic & understanding version of Donne that I have read; as Stubbs has himself said in an interview “ people are very possessive about Donne, and rightly so,” & I have read some, to me, very upsetting (& wrong) interpretations of the man.
Links
BOOK REVIEW / Odd jobs and strange tales: 'The Crocodile Bird .
05Oct1864, A Good Deal of Reading
John Stubbs « Interview « ReadySteadyBook - a literary site
