DR: WE'RE HERE TO TALK ABOUT Anne Donovan's third book, Being Emily. Her first two have been highly praised, and her last one, Buddha Da, went on to be shortlisted for virtually every literary prize going.
It's the story of Fiona, a Glasgow girl
whom we first meet when she is 11. Most things seem to be right with her world: hers is a close, loving family, with an elder brother Patrick and younger twins Mona and Rona. At 15, her world has collapsed: her mother has died in childbirth, her father has taken to drink, Patrick has left for London and the twins are growing up wild.
There's more tragedy in store, but also the possibility of first love with Jas, a sensitive, Shelley-loving Sikh. He and Fiona are drawn to each other partly because he has also lost his father, but in time he seems to Fiona to represent too safe a choice.
Fiona expects more than that, and thinks she's found it in Jas's brother Amrik – who is even more committed to his music than Fiona is to her art. And the art does matter – Donovan is trying to give us a portrait of the artist as a young student, as well as of a daughter coming to terms with family tragedy and holding that family together afterwards.
The question is, how well does she succeed? Willy, Anne is a graduate of the creative course you run in Glasgow, and she showed you the typescript of this novel last summer. What did you think of it?
WM: I had all the misgivings I did when I read Buddha Da: for all the qualities of content, for all its grace and honesty, for all the excellent way Fiona's emotional turmoil is handled, I felt there was a contrivance and a convenience and a coincidence to it and also a tendency to have a neat, pat, sugary ending. That disappointed me because I think that's a weakness in her writing – she's just this side of the mawkish and sentimental. So I advised her either to have an open ending or one in which Fiona rejects both of the two destructive brothers she's involved with.
Anne handles character and dialogue so well, and writes about a world you can care about and become interested in – but I think she lacks edge. How can sassy, salty, spiky writing lead to such a cavity-causing conclusion? My advice is: drop the dessert. For guidance on how a novel might achieve a sugar-free ending, I refer Anne to Rachel Seiffert's Afterwards, where there's a real denouement that's worth the journey. That said, I think it is a good and important book. But Buddha Da had the same faulty ending too...
DR: Was that really that much of a fault, given all those prizes?
WM:Put it this way: a student on the course has written a story with a similar theme but one I thought had a lot more integrity.
DR: Does integrity always equate with an unhappy ending?
WM: A more open one would have been a lot better. This one left me feeling as though I had eaten a very filling dessert. That said, as a novel about Glasgow I think it's every bit as good as Louise Welsh's The Cutting Room, though it's a totally different kind of book.
LR: Earlier, you used the word "important". Why did you think it was an important book?
WM: Because I think Anne does childhood terrifically well. Also she writes in a tremendously understated Scots, even more so in this book than Buddha Da, and I think it's a true-to-life portrait of this city as well as a credible portrait of the artist as a young woman.
LM: I thought the ending fitted the book perfectly, because the book is mawkish. Where to start? The stereotypical characters. The gay brother who is interested in fashion and interior design. The lesbian aunt with her short, spiky hair. The father who goes through great tragedy and alcoholism and is then "fixed" by regular Scrabble sessions.
I found it superficial. Everybody in it is so nice. It's so full of clichés. I'd also like to ask: what is the connection with Emily Brontë all about? It's there in the title and we are shown Fiona reading up about Emily Brontë for her English Highers. And though both Fiona and Emily have the same family structure – the mother dying young, one brother and two sisters – it seemed a simplistic link.
LR: To me it was a red herring. Other books have used the Brontës amusingly, like Stevie Davies's Four Dreamers and Emily and Rachel Ferguson's The Brontës Went to Woolworths. To my mind, Donovan doesn't do enough with this inspiration, doesn't lift it above the mundane or justify its place at the centre of the book. Overall, I was disappointed by it too and I agree about the "central casting" characters. Reading it felt like a chore – or should I say less preferable than doing the chores?
PC: I like the voice she writes in, and have always found it engaging. But this novel to me feels like a fleshed-out short story and it can't hold up the weight of a novel. I don't think it ever becomes more than a mildly diverting read: it just runs through too many serious things far too quickly.
KC: I agree with Willy about the ending of the book, but I did enjoy it. I thought it was a touching story, and used Scots impressively, with Fiona's accent becoming less and less broad as she grew up and perhaps evidence of an unconscious (or, in her brother Patrick's case, conscious) suppression of the openness and naivety we're all born with. But there were a lot of unlikely coincidences, like Fiona going out with Amrik, her boyfriend's brother, who then has an affair with her own brother ...
LM: And everybody gets on – that's the thing. This is a girl who loses her mother, then her home in a tenement fire, then her boyfriend, then her baby. Yet apart from one scene, there's no anger. I can't help contrasting this with Agnes Owens's writing, which has a very dark sense of humour; there's so much underneath it. Whereas here – I hate the term, but it felt like chick lit: light and fluffy. There wasn't a soul in peril at any point, there was no real danger. I was disappointed.
KC: Did you not feel a couple of major cruxes of the book – like when her mother died in childbirth and when Fiona breaks off her relationship with Jas and starts a passionate affair with his brother – did you not think these shouldn't have happened offstage? To me, this unravelling of Fiona's loving, secure family life was a bit too gentle in places. I felt Fiona's mum's death would have been much more immediate and intense had we been with her throughout her pregnancy.
Similarly, with Amrik, the great, sweeping passion of Fiona's life – I would have liked to have seen this initial can't-keep-my-hands-off-him passion played out, rather than being told about it afterwards. This would have made the subsequent upheaval and betrayal even more convincing.
DR: Anyone else think it's a rather PC novel? Jas, Fiona's Sikh boyfriend, seems too good to be true – and that goes for all the rest of his family.
KC: And Glasgow isn't exactly renowned for its tolerance ... There are so many potential issues here that I would like to have seen followed through.
PC: She's almost positing society as it should be. The lesbian aunt and her partner and baby, the gay brother ... it all felt too easy somehow. Against that, I did think my teenage self would have loved this book. Everything it has to say about the line of tension between art and family would have certainly worked for me back then.
LM: Yes, because in a sense there was something juvenile about it. It has a naivety to it which can be quite charming, but it was an empty kind of charm. Though moments like that are succeeded by other bottom-clenching ones ....
LR: Like when Fiona describes Amrik as a "fallen angel". Every word describing his effect on Fiona is dull and deadly.
WM: It's more than 100 years since Henry James in The Future of the Novel was saying that women wanted something more from the novel, for stories that were true to their lives. And this one has a cutesiness that means it isn't.
KC: But what about characterisation of Fiona herself? Personally, I thought she was convincingly multi-dimensional.
LM: She's quite appealing. But that's part of the problem: in this book, everyone is.
PC: She's so lacking in self-awareness – given that she is someone who is winning awards for her art there's a curious lack of self-examination about her. That's part of the reason why for me reading this was a candyflossy experience.
WM: Just like the ending of Buddha Da, when the wife goes off with a PhD philosophy student and has a child by him and the husband goes off to be a Buddhist and at the end everything is perfectly fine between them. That was too Mills & Boon and this novel has not learnt from it. Instead it capitulates too easily to cosiness and quietism.
KC: True, Buddha Da had the same neat, cheery ending, but it had some beautiful writing in it.
What I liked about both books is the way in which she weaves spirituality through her story. It's not something extraneous or extraordinary but people's beliefs are just part of their life and it's no big deal. I liked that. It's uplifting and comforting, about people who are essentially good, just trying to find their way in life the best that they can.
LR: It's just that if Fiona had been shown as feeling more and going through more, she would have deserved the happy ending. I've nothing against happy endings, but I never felt convinced by all the bad things that had happened to her in the first place.
And although there are clearly meant to be connections between artistic creativity and the creation of life as in having a baby, they didn't really work for me either.
KC: But isn't there ever a case for escapism in literature?
LM: One writer who came into my mind a bit when reading this was Andrea Levy. Her work is upbeat too, and she's also interested in how families work, but it's much sharper and more perceptive than this.
That said, Anne Donovan can write. There are odd great lines here and there ("clear east-coast skies wi birlin white angel clouds giving wae to lurkin grey battleships" for example), but while the novel was enjoyable enough to read, I was just disappointed at how insubstantial it was.
'Ah'd developed a new interest in housework'THROUGH in the livin room Patrick was paintin the fireplace while Mona and Rona practised their line dancin. Silver Bells and golden needles they won't mend this heart of mine; Step two three, cross two three, turn. It's threads, no bells, says ma da, weavin his way through their routine.
Mona and Rona are twins. At first the doc thought it was gonnae be triplets and Da wanted tae call them Mona, Rona and Shona. Mammy says she's thankful for small mercies – ah'm no sure if she means havin two babies at once insteidy three, or if it's the name. The neighbours doonstairs have a dug called Shona, it's a sheltie.
Patrick's on the nightshift at the bakery, and when he gets hame the back of six he's wired up, cannae sleep for hours. That's when he paints the fireplace. He's done it three times – first white but that was too borin, then dark red, but Da said it hurts his eyes. Noo he's tryin a marbled effect wi lilac and pink through the red. When everybody else gets up, we have cornflakes and Patrick has bacon, egg and tattie scones, then he goes tae bed and we go tae school. Except this was the first day of the summer holidays so we werenae.
Ah was at the sink in the kitchen, washin the dishes wi Spirit of Haworth propped up behind the taps, practisin bein Emily Brontë. Ah'd read that she baked the family's bread and learned German at the same time, book in fronty her. Since then ah'd developed a new interest in housework, so long as you could dae it while you were readin. Up till then ah thought if you were gonnae be a poet you had tae float aboot in a dwam or lie on a couch all day.
© Anne Donovan. From Being Emily (Canongate, £10.99)
MEET OUR PANELLISTSKaren Campbell (KC) is a former police officer and council PR but is now a full-time writer. She graduated with distinction from Glasgow University's MLitt creative writing course, and has had several short stories published. Her first novel, The Twilight Time, was published last month by Hodder & Stoughton.
Philippa Cochrane (PC) is the Learning Manager at Scottish Book Trust, responsible for working on the educational aspects of its projects.
Willy Maley (WM) is Professor of Renaissance Studies in the English Literature Department at Glasgow University, where he co-founded the Creative Writing MLitt course with Philip Hobsbaum. He is a poet and playwright as well as the author of numerous (more than 500!) academic papers and journalistic essays.
Lesley McDowell (LM) is a novelist, book reviewer for The Scotsman and other newspapers, and a former lecturer at St Andrews University. Her first novel, The Picnic, was published last year by Black and White and she has just received a Scottish Arts Council bursary to allow her to work on her second novel.
Lee Randall (LR) is a columnist, interviewer, reviewer and assistant editor (magazines and arts) for The Scotsman. She is also former editor of Scotland on Sunday's Spectrum magazine.
David Robinson (DR) is books editor of The Scotsman. His first book, In Cold Ink, will be published next month.
WIN CHAMPAGNE AND A COPY OF ANNE DONOVAN'S NEW NOVEL WITH YOUR PICK OF FEELGOOD FICTIONOur critics seemed to think Anne Donovan had sacrificed credibility for a happy ending. This raises an interesting point: are they contradictory? Is the totally believable, warm-hearted novel really impossible?
We don't think it is, so for this month's competition we're asking readers to pick out the SCOTTISH novel that cheers them up most while remaining completely believable. We are offering copies of Anne Donovan's Being Emily for the six best answers. Our overall winner will also receive a bottle of Champagne and an invitation to join our next Book Club meeting on 21 May. Travel expenses will be paid from anywhere in Scotland.
At that meeting we will discuss Andrew O'Hagan's The Atlantic Ocean, a collection of essays about Britain and America to be published in June by Faber. As well as being one of Scotland's finest novelists, O'Hagan is an enormously talented essayist, the New York Times rating him as "the best essayist of his generation".
Send your reply to the Scotsman Book Club Competition, Books Editor, The Scotsman, 108 Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AS. E-mail replies should be sent to bookclub@scotsman.com The closing date is Thursday 15 May.
The full article contains 2592 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
