by Sharon Blackie
Two Ravens Press, 357pp, £8.99
IT'S HARD TO TELL FROM SHARON Blackie's multi-faceted CV (neuroscientist, therapist, publisher, pilot) how many years The Long Delirious Burning Blue may have been in gestation. But it is that ra
rity, a first novel that smacks of not merely confidence, but authority, a sense that the story is true and clearly envisioned, with the technique to make it seem seamless, dynamic and written with verve and a care for the English language. It is also – not incidentally – hugely enjoyable and sometimes very moving, if on occasion, over-egged.
Its first and last sentences – separated by over 350 pages of driven narrative – are telling. "The past clings to you like a skin," it begins. "I let go," is its terse conclusion. Both are spoken by Cat Munro, a neurotic, driven corporate lawyer based in Scottsdale, Arizona, but born in Scotland and raised in the working-class north-east of England in the 1960s and 1970s by her single-parent mother and then by her aunt and kindly uncle.
Uncle Billy is the salve throughout childhood's turbulence. The rest, for Cat, is a saga of rows and bile and maternal boozing, of denigration by Laura her mother, and then by Aunt Lizzie. She has grown unpleasant layers of protective skin. And now, in America, as an achiever, living with Adam, her lawyer partner, and on the brink of her 40th birthday, she's forced to take stock, face the past and her ingrained fears. Cat's terror of flying is so intense that she decides to confront it starkly by learning to fly.
By the novel's poignant conclusion her efforts have become both a metaphor for her journey towards a more telling form of release and a source of great physical pleasure.
This features significantly in the novel's opening scene with Laura and Cat flying over a loch in the Scottish Highlands – Laura's new home in her old age. While Cat reminds her of the past, of Laura's shibboleth that it clings to you, she tells Laura she was wrong. The mother is silent. The rest of the novel follows in flashback, until we return, at the book's final gasp, to the scene in the turbo-prop over the mountains, with Cat now the pilot of both their fates.
Blackie shuffles several points of view. Cat's voice is first person, but Laura's story is told at arm's length, except for insertions of often harrowing autobiography, written by Laura and mailed to her daughter in Arizona. These become Laura's attempts at some kind of explanation, of how and why the mess of their pasts came to be. These segments are intercut with passages of description depicting Laura's new life in the Highlands where writing stories (principally folk tales about the selkie woman who also loses her skin, her precious past) provides a true sense of purpose and meaning.
At first Cat resists her mother's overtures. She is trapped in her career and in her relationship with Adam. Adam never really cracks it as a character you can believe in, but then comes Jesse, strong and reserved, Cat's handsome flying instructor. Blackie saves him from the stereotypical fate of a woman's magazine Adonis –she gives him life through Cat's perception of what he means to her, bestowing a double significance on his existence.
This changes the novel from its guise as an exploration of the anatomy of anxiety (beautifully, carefully dissected) into a tale of love and rescue. Yet oddly, despite the closeness of Cat's first-person narration, it is Laura who touches the heart. Her time is past, and, as she bemoans at the novel's outset, she "hates this grey, dull person that she's become. Hates this old woman, this stranger who's beginning to invade her."
What makes her so desperately moving, and gives the novel a true sense of depth, is the tricky progress she makes through its pages. She changes, unburdens herself, is true and brave and affecting. Cat is less giving, understandably so, but slowly she comes to realise how much she and Laura share.
The ending is nonetheless powerful (reminiscent of The English Patient), filmic, and achieving the kind of symmetry that novels often aspire to, but rarely reach. The book feels finished, yet open-ended. I turned again to its opening page.
The full article contains 730 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
