Scrapbook, The

Life on a small island, with the only work opportunities being at the soap factory, is one to escape as far as the young people are concerned; but for Fern, living with her mother swilling in gin, and whom she blames for the death of her beloved Granny Ivy, getting off the island had been essential. And escape allowed her to reinvent herself without all that awful history of weirdness and witchcraft that has twined itself around her family on the island. Fern has come home to the island to look after her mother Iris, whose health is failing, and also to escape the complications of her life on the mainland. She and her mother circle each other in a dance of strike and counter-strike, softened by their shared irreverence and humour. The fragments and glimpses of memory that twist through this novel are like a scrapbook. Each isolated fragment is an intense episode, woven or glued together to create a book of depth and strength. The slowly emerging narrative is a story of loss and absence: a family of women who seem unable to appreciate what they have because of what is missing. The men in their lives vanish: one stolen away, one dying and one simply disappearing, leaving a wasteland of grief and bitterness. The women who are left – Iris, Ivy and Ivy’s sister Rose – rarely love each other; resentment, suspicion and corroding bitterness sour their lives. This is Fern’s inheritance. The Scrapbook is not a book that wallows in all that sadness. There is a wonderful sharp bite of wit and human affection in amongst the pathos. A growing, exasperated love and understanding between Fern and her mother is accelerated by Fern’s realisation that her grandmother Ivy was no angel. Ivy’s charms and spells, carefully recorded in her scrapbook, are sometimes benign, but not always. Fern’s perception of her grandmother didn’t allow her to see how Ivy had failed her daughter Iris and only been able to love her granddaughter Fern as a mother should. Childhood memories are so snatched and distorted by the overlaying of others’ interpretation and suggestions: Fern has created a picture of her missing father which is fixedly negative, but as the book progresses we find that this is how her mother wants Fern to see him. Iris wishes to keep Fern excluded from the relationship – a jealously guarded love for a man who has been absent for seventeen years. Caryl Holmes writes with insight and sensitivity of the strength of love and the power of this emotion to cripple as well as benefit those under its influence. Ivy, her sister Rose, and Iris, are blighted by the distortion of their lives caused by the overwhelming love they feel for their men. The two daughters in the novel, Iris and Fern, are a poor and inadequate result of such overwhelming love, and consequently suffer. That all this intense turmoil of emotions takes place on an island only adds to the sense of love being out of control, out of scale with normal life. The Scrapbook is a gripping novel, written deftly and with humour – a series of acutely observed vignettes of seriously dysfunctional family life. It is utterly absorbing. -- Lucy Walter @ www.gwales.com