I'm delighted to welcome Adèle Geras for another guest blog. I'd never heard of Bernadine Bishop but I want to read her now and I'm sure you will too.
BERNADINE BISHOP: a novelist you ought to read.
by Adèle Geras
The year that has just ended brought another discovery. Bernadine Bishop died of bowel cancer before she discovered that she hadn’t won the 2013 Costa Novel Prize with her book UNEXPECTED LESSONS IN LOVE. She had written two novels in her twenties, and then spent most of her life working as a therapist, having children and living what was clearly a very productive life. With the onset of cancer, though, she began to write fiction again and the two novels I’ve read from this period are so good, and so intriguing that I felt they ought to be brought to the attention of the readers of this blog.
UNEXPECTED LESSONS IN LOVE is the story of two friends, Cecilia and Helen, who have bowel cancer. Of all the books I’ve read recently that tackle this subject, (and there are plenty, even in YA fiction…think of THE FAULT IN OUR STARS etc) this one seems to me to be head and shoulders above any of the others. It is matter-of-fact and plain speaking: telling it like it is with neither sensationalism nor sentimentality. Bishop doesn’t flinch from physical details but she never exaggerates for effect nor asks us to gawp or shriek in horror. Also, the cancer and dealing with it turn out not to be the only focus of the book. The plot is mainly about how this sick woman and her helpful and loving but sometimes not altogether useful husband cope with the grandchild that their son leaves with them when the baby’s mother goes AWOL for months. Cecilia has to look after the baby because the son is a foreign correspondent and always on a plane to somewhere dangerous. What follows from this is very carefully plotted and very funny in some places. It’s also intensely moving. We follow the two friends and their families as they make the cancer journey and also have to negotiate the other stuff that life throws at everyone, not only at sufferers from a life-limiting illness. It’s brilliant, and ultimately cheering and I do recommend it most sincerely.
We meet a family of three high-achieving siblings, all middle aged. Hereward Tree, the eldest of the trio, is a famous novelist and he spends most of the novel lying in hospital in a coma. He has a fiancée, Carina, who is much younger and Italian. His sister, Romola, is a head teacher and an intelligent and somewhat unfulfilled woman, deeply devoted to both her brothers. Roger (unfortunately named, I think) is a sensitive and kind and generous priest. He is also a child abuser. He has confessed, and is on his way to prison. We know this from the very beginning.
Entwined with the story of the Tree siblings is the narrative that centres around Betty Winterborne. She’s a widow. She has a daughter who’s unmarried and has a good career as a dermatologist. She had a son, but he died in a tragic accident on a school trip when he was ten years old, decades ago. Roger was a teacher at the school at the time, and he may have caused the boy’s death.
We are in the territory of moral dilemmas. How should Romola deal with Hereward’s unfinished novel, whose ending she feels is a travesty? Will Betty find out the truth about the fatal school trip? How should Julia make her dream of a baby come true when she has no boyfriend or husband on the horizon? And is Carina right to wrestle with a guilt of her own? Will Romola let Hereward’s novel stand as he wrote it? And Roger: how will he deal with his undoubted guilt? How will he cope in prison?
The story unfolds with exemplary economy and elegance and yet we never feel we are short -changed. Bernadine Bishop is a wise and wonderful writer and I do urge you to try and find these two books. I’m going to read another late novel of hers called THE STREET. I can’t wait.
