Books
Childhood elegy. Fiction - Helen Dunmore's preoccupation with time lost reaches its climax with this exploration of bereavement. But the horror is too much to bear, writes Amanda Craig
Published 29 September 2003
Mourning Ruby
Helen Dunmore Viking, 310pp, £16.99
ISBN 0670914495
To turn the death of a child into the subject of a novel takes courage, at least for a literary novelist. The abduction, rape or murder of children is a staple in crime fiction: so for a child to die as a result of running into a road, as happens in Mourning Ruby, would barely cause most readers' hearts to miss a beat.
Rebecca, the narrator, was herself deprived of both father and mother, having been found in a shoebox outside an Italian restaurant. Her story begins with a wry humour more suggestive of the picaresque than what follows. One likes her immediately - for not turning out the way her adoptive parents hope, for her fantasies about pickpockets on the Tube, for mistrusting sensitive people: "In my experience what they are chiefly sensitive to is themselves. My adoptive mother had nerves as rare as orchids." (Dunmore, who is also a poet, excels at this kind of metaphor - inspired, if you think how orchids' roots resemble ganglia.)
Even so, a shadow lies over the comedy. By the time Rebecca survives an emergency plane landing and sees her child Ruby in the second of touchdown, you know this is going to be a tale of unbearable tragedy. It does not, however, unfold quite as you might expect.
Dunmore has successfully carried her readership through the horrors of incest, murder and war by means of prose and plot-lines as taut as hawsers. Her preoccupation with time lost reaches a climax in this exploration of bereavement. Where past and present have overlapped in previous novels, as in Talking to the Dead, there has been a conventional narrative to follow, with surprises and twists arising out of a mastery of technique. Mourning Ruby is constructed differently. Not only does Rebecca's story jump about from past to present, sometimes within the space of a paragraph, but her tale contains other, smaller stories, like a Russian doll.
Rebecca has a best friend, Joe, who introduces her to her future husband, Adam. Joe is obsessed by Stalin and by Stalin's wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, and part of the novel revolves around the question of whether it was suicide or murder that left Nadezhda's children motherless. Ultimately, Rebecca's story dissolves into a novel that Joe has begun to write, about a prostitute and a pilot in the First World War. (This is so good that you can't help hoping it will be the springboard for the real thing next time.) "You take a flight inside yourself when reality becomes unbearable," as Joe says, and the novel enacts Rebecca's state of fugue.
This becomes hard work, despite the quality of the writing and the author's humane insights. Dunmore is, I think, the most gifted novelist of her generation, and consistently pushes herself to new challenges - most impressively in her last novel, The Siege, which fused the personal and the political in its account of the siege of Leningrad. Here, the historical dimension feels extraneous to the intimacy and horror of the book's central theme, which is the passion and fragility of the bond between mother and child. Everything centres on this, from Adam's job as a paediatrician to the novel that Joe writes. Florence, the young unmarried mother in Joe's novel, becomes a prostitute in order to survive with her daughter. It becomes too obsessive, and all too much.
Grief and anger drive a wedge between Rebecca and Adam for three years, even though there is hope that, by coming together to mourn their dead daughter, they will have a future together. The small joys of having a child, the total immersion of the self in love, are sensitively described. Yet there is a darker side to parenting that makes this a less credible novel than Talking to the Dead, with its sinuous and sinister revelation of sibling jealousy. Overwhelming love brings with it a fear of harm so intense that parents often fantasise about their child's death as a release. For all the nauseating sentiment surroun- ding Little Nell, Dickens understood this; here, Dunmore evades it.
Because the novel focuses only on the beauty and charm of a young child, and the devastation of the bereaved parents, none of the characters steps into full moral life. Although Dunmore began her career portraying flawed, richly sexual beings, her characters have become increasingly "good" people in terrible situations arising from external rather than internal forces. Mourning Ruby is never less than accomplished and formally inventive, but one needs more than this, and horror, to achieve a work of art.
Amanda Craig's new novel, Love in Idleness, is published by Little, Brown
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