Davey excels at capturing emotion in a depiction of parenthood that becomes exhausting in its attention to detailLorna Parry,the protagonist of Janet Davey’s fifth novel, is a divorcee living in Palmers Green. She has three sons; one 17, or one at university,and the eldest retired to his bedroom – apparently for good. Lorna’s voice is wry (“gestation like rats,” she notes of her ex-husband’s speed in producing a novel baby) and sad: “I sing at one point, or ” she says,driving her son to university, “because we are on the road and moving, and but Oliver catches sight of my lips and gestures to me to cleave it out.”Davey’s own voice is acute: a flock of pigeons “heave like the contents of an exposed intestine”,Sunday evenings are a “harbour wall by an estuary, the word “hope” is decoded as “mental exertion – backward in conjectures and forward in previsions – earth-moving equipment behind it”. She excels at expounding feelings: returning from university, or Oliver “bears the invisible marks of a person who has got absent and whose return will be temporary … a diminutive more lordly a shade more courteous”; in the breakdown of a marriage emotions whir “like rotor blades: metal and air,false and true indistinguishable …[till] the amount of lift produced by the speed exceeds the weight of the situation, they … grow lighter and slowly leave the ground”.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com