Your next read: the one the Booker missed — Ripeness by Sarah Moss (Picador)
by
Tig!
Should you buy and read this book? Yes, you absolutely should — or get it from your local library. In doing so you will prove yourself much smarter than this year’s Booker judges, who didn’t even put it on the longlist ffs! Why should you read it? Because it is clever and wise and beautifully written, featuring a protagonist who is, I feel, very much like Real People. Somewhat past the middle of her life, Edith finds herself not in a dark wood, but in a small rural town on the edge of the west coast of Ireland. She’s content with her life as a septuagenarian incomer from Dublin, where she was married — and divorced — to a lawyer and has an adult son. She has good friends in the community, most of all with Maebh, whose family have roots in the locale lasting for generations. She’ s having great sex with her casual lover Gunther, a German ceramicist (OK, so not all Real septuagenarians are having great sex, but you know, we can dream), she’s come through Covid and lockdown, enjoys the walking and landscapes but is also a bit restless. The community have welcomed some Ukrainians who have arrived since the Russian invasion with open arms, and they are employed in the local economy, as cleaners or at the café. But when a group of refugees — Africans, others, young men — are bussed in from Dublin to be housed in a local hotel, a protest is staged, organised by Edith’s great friend Maebh, and all of a sudden, Edith has to have a long, hard look at herself and ask herself if she must pick sides, is she on the side of the ‘good’ immigrants, or the ‘bad’?
She’s the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, the only person in the family to get out of Europe, who met and married Edith’s farmer father in the English Midlands, But her mother, demanding, unreliable, unable to settle to a steady life offers a template to Edith of a life where the suitcase is always packed, always ready to move at a moment’s notice. When Edith is 17, in the 1960s, her mother sends her to Lake Como, where Edith’s older, beautiful ballet-dancer sister Lydia is staying at an artists colony with a troupe of other dancers, unwillingly waiting to give birth to a child that is a result of some very shaky, 1960s, non-consensual sexual politics. Lydia has refused to have an abortion, as a reaction to the deaths of the all the Jewish children during the Holocaust that their mother has spoken of, but does not want to keep the child, so Edith is there to help Lydia with the pregnancy and birth, and then to hand the baby onto nuns, for adoption. Part of the novel is the form of a missive from Edith to her unknown nephew, to be opened and read in the event of her death, and it contains some of the most lyrical and beautiful writing in the book, as Edith describes the landscape around the Lake, small farms and orchards full of ripe fruit, cold swims in the Lake and of the grand house in which the young dancers are living and working.
Meanwhile back in contemporary Ireland, Maebh is contacted out of the blue by an American who has discovered, using some sort of Ancestry website, that he is in fact her brother, born to their mother in the 1950s, when she was a teenager and also as a result of extremely dodgy sexual politics, and he wants to come and visit his ancestral home — in many ways a very ‘good’ immigrant, but an awkward one to explain to Maebh’s family. She turns to Edith for advice, unaware of Edith’s difficulties with her friend’s racist attitude towards to recently arrived refugee, and Edith finds a way to square the circle for her own satisfaction — but not this reader’s.
There are lots of big themes addressed in the book — migration, identity, climate change, female agency, the search for a moral life, but they are dealt with in a terrific narrative that moves along smoothly. The gear changes between the 1960s and contemporary time are never clunky. Edith is a totally believable person of the liberal left, who is finding themselves marginalised for all sorts of reasons, not least because of her age — nothing more invisible than an older woman after all — but whose heart is in the right place. I absolutely loved it and recommend you try it. And if anyone has a number for Gunther, please pass it on.
