Graham Joyce – Some Kind Of Fairy Tale

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Book Review, Fantasy Fiction, Graham Joyce, Myths and Legends, Some Kind Of Fairy Tale

Nothing like Tinkerbell

Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a gentler, sadder story (for adults) than The Tooth Fairy. Joyce writes about the world of myth and magic through very adult eyes indeed, and his fairy world (we are repeatedly told that the denizens of that world get very angry indeed at being referred to as fairies) are sometimes akin to angelic hordes, and sometimes seem to have more than a touch of the demonic about them.

The plot of this is simple. Tara, a young girl, not quite 16, living near Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire, disappears. Fears of course are of abduction, kidnapping and murder. No body is ever found, but her family is broken and devastated. The lives of her parents are blighted, her brother Peter loses not only his beloved sister, but also his best friend Richie, Tara’s boyfriend, suspected by all and sundry (including the police) of having done away with Tara following an argument.

Little Chittenden Wood; bluebell time (fairies’ flower)

The book opens 20 years later, with a knock on the door – Tara has returned, looking no older than 18 at the most, and she has a tale to tell which no one believes.

Woven into Tara’s stories are erudite chapter beginnings involving quotations by some of the great and good who have made serious studies of the importance of myth and fairy stories from a wide ranging geography of cultures – Marina Warner, Bruno Bettelheim, Joseph Campbell, as well as literary writers such as Angela Carter, G.K Chesterton, and who used these stories to uncover the deep subconscious levels they allude to .

Katherine Cameron artwork – Thomas The Rhymer, Wiki Commons

One such quoted chapter heading source is the following rather lovely comment from W.H. Auden

‘A fairy tale……………on the other hand, demands of the reader total surrender; so long as he is in its world, there must for him be no other’

The other woven story is that of a real trial which took place in Ireland, not that long ago, in 1895, where a young woman Bridget Cleary was tortured and burned by her husband, father, other relatives and neighbours, because they believed she had been stolen away by fairies and the woman now appearing to be Bridget was in fact a fairy changeling. Excerpts from the court transcripts are quoted. This is very far from twee.

Joyce, a serious writer with however a mordant and gleeful touch mixes together a story about ageing, memory, lost dreams, yearnings for a world of less ordinary meaning, the real wonder of the world we live in if we only wake from our dream, with these erudite writings and literary traditions from the fairy world.

As for that mordant gleefulness. Much humour is laced in around psychobabble – Tara submits to psychotherapy with a maverick hip practitioner, who nevertheless naval gazes wonderfully poking in the cauldron of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual – a self-publicised Bible of mental health diagnosis, where anything remotely human can be rendered as pathology.

Further fun is had with Tara’s 13 year old nephew, very much in the middle of sulking hormonal adolescence, with more than a touch of the Adrian Moles about him. I never thought I would find a dead cat funny……………………….

I enjoyed this enormously and will certainly be making my way through more of Joyce’s canon of work.

My only slight reservation was of the importance of Richie in Tara’s story – it looked as if the relationship was on the out, through Tara’s wishes, when she disappeared, so the ain true love aspect (on her side) didn’t quite feel as potent as suggested

Some Kind Of Fairy Tale Amazon UK
Some Kind Of Fairy Tale Amazon USA

Michele Forbes – Ghost Moth

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Belfast, Book Review, Ghost Moth, Irish writer, Michele Forbes

An ordinary life: Always far above the ordinary

Several of the comments from readers in her publishing house, refer to Forbes’ writing as dreamy, dream-like. For me, it is the reverse. It is writing which awakens the slumbering reader from their soporific state, into noticing, into being present.

There came a point, fairly early in the book, when I suddenly sat up and said `Yes!’

The central character Katherine, a wife and mother of 4, is married to George, a dependable, good man. They live in Northern Ireland. It is 1969. This means some shattering events are just over the horizon.

The book opens with a small, alarming event, which unsettles Katherine enough to send her memory spooling back to an earlier time, 20 years ago, when she was a young woman with a beautiful operatic singing voice, and perhaps was at a major fork in her life’s road. In 1949 George is already courting her, but she meets Tom, a far more volatile curious character who makes her feel dynamic, touched with glamour and vitality.

The shape of the book is to take us between the then of 1949 and the now of 1969 and see how that became this, and the intercutting structure allows the reader (like 1969 Katherine) to hold both.

My `Yes!’ moment came at the recounting of a meeting in a café between Katherine and Tom

The large doors leading into the tearooms from the foyer swung backwards and forwards as people bustled in and out. Nearby, a high-spirited couple chatted about a film they had just seen. Other people were looking out for the arrival of friends. Four young women sitting together chimed together like a carillon, their words ringing around them. One woman sat on her own just to the left of the doorway, every so often lifting her head to view those coming and going. She twisted her teacup on its saucer, occasionally tipping it to peruse its contents. As she lifted the cup to her mouth, small drops of tea fell onto the saucer like brown baby lemmings falling into a shiny white sea. Never before had she seemed so aware of the detail of her surroundings. Never before so keenly as this.

My `Yes’ moment wasn’t just the delight of a couple of `awake, reader’ images which helped me to really `see the moment’ – that ringing carillon of voices, and the wonderful lemmings image – it was the realisation here was a writer doing a lot more than `painting the scene’ – here was a writer inside a character in an altered state of consciousness. It is Katherine who is awake, not the writer putting some description in place to make the scene real for the reader.

Katherine, at this point, demonstrates the `aliveness’ Tom brings her by the quality of her noticing.

I was reminded, wonderfully, of a couple of lines from a Yeats poem, Vacillation where `awakening’ suddenly happens:

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

Forbes had thrown me into Katherine’s experience by this sudden description of the character’s vision.

I was nicely heading towards surrendering to Forbes’ writing, there had been other little jolts to take me out of my own reality and into her fictional world, but from this point, I flung up my arms and said `okay, I capitulate to your book; resistance is futile’

As the book progressed, however, it became more and more clear that Forbes’ horizons with this book were expanding into all sorts of areas. What she does, in effect, is take the weft and warp of a quite ordinary life, and makes the day-to-day reality of it both three dimensional and paper thin, so `this real’ is but a cloak for the beauty or terror of the world – sometimes both, which lies thinly hidden by the material world. There are some wonderful, unostentatious descriptions of how we move through a world of solid things, the `stuff’ we surround ourselves with, anchoring and grounding us in the here and now.

She is very definitely a writer of poetic sensibilities, something I value very much – I don’t by this mean necessarily lyrical writing – poetry can be full of harsh, stark violent imagery – its that sense of proper perception, of not being satisfied with the superficial cliché, of a choice of word after word which has weight, resonance, solidity.

How does she do this? Dunno, guv, it’s a mystery, I can’t see her joins, her mastery of her technique is fine enough so that the reader can’t spot how she is doing what she does.

One chapter (amongst many) really stood out for me. A simple description of 3 little girls going off to play beside the blackberry bushes. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland is trembling on the edges of fast escalating sectarian violence. I read this chapter, from inside the head of Elsa, Katherine’s youngest child, and was almost permanently sick with anxiety and terror, during the reading of it. And yet, terror of what? Nothing concrete, nothing nameable, only that Elsa was close to the thin boundary of `ordinary reality’ where we normally try to live, in unawareness of the fragility of it all.

This is a first novel. The cover has reviews from the great and good, in praise. And in (I finally realise) a nice sense of the ordinary, page after page of breathless praise from all the people in the publishing house who read this book. Initially I read the praise of these named, but unfamous people with some cynicism.

That changed, when I fell into Michelle Forbes’ textured, powerful, tale of a life, like all ordinary lives, far less ordinary

And, in a world where thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier books become the norm – Forbes’ needed no red pencil to her less than 250 pages, slim, rich, easy read, deep read, novel.

Stunning.

I received this as an ARC from the Amazon Vine programme, UK

Ghost Moth Amazon UK
Ghost Moth Amazon USA

Andrew Greig – That Summer

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Andrew Greig, Book Review, Second World War, That Summer

Reminds me of the debt my generation owe

This is a wonderful book set in the home front in the second world war. Though I’ve read lots of first world war novels, and lots about the atrocities of the Holocaust, I’ve read very few books about what it meant to be in the forces at home, and perhaps have not thought too much about what it meant to be part of a generation who went to war, and who felt their sacrifices HAD to be done, because the alternative was too ghastly to contemplate (clearly a very different experience from the First World War)

Greig focusses on the story of a young fighter pilot and a radar operator, during the Battle of Britain, and they and their immediate friends symbolise the personal stories of a generation. This is a beautifully written book, extremely sad, but without any mawkishness. The ending is absolutely obvious right from the start of the book, but this is not a problem – it is the journey to get to that inevitable end that is the heart, not what that ending will be.

This was the first book i ever came across, by lucky chance, from the Scottish poet and novelist Andrew Greig. He is a profoundly excellent writer, managing the craft of narrative, depth and authentic characters, coupled with that precision of language which the discipline of poetry brings.

Greig manages that subtle and wonderful marriage of creating characters who are so particular and individual that they move beyond the individual and particular to reveal profound, and transcendent truths

That Summer Amazon UK
That Summer Amazon USA

Rhidian Brook – The Aftermath

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Book Review, Post-War Germany, Rhidian Brook, The Aftermath

Film development first, novel later?

I have several reservations about Rhidian Brook’s novel about the Allied occupation of Germany after the war, and the difficult relationships both between the Allies themselves, each with agendas, sometimes oppositional, and between the occupying Allies and a defeated Germany.

Brook takes this down to an individual level, and presents the story (based on his own family history) set in the devastation of Hamburg. The Allies were requisitioning houses. Few of course were left standing, so it was the generally untouched outskirts of the city, where the wealthy lived, which British forces occupied. The higher up the tree of command you were, the better the requisitioned house. German residents of those houses would be billeted out in camps. As the residents of the big houses were the ones most likely to have had Nazi Party affiliations, because any Jews or those opposed to the regime would have been ousted from their salubrious residences, there was a certain rough justice going on in the minds of the British administration.

The Central story concerns a rather more compassionate and nuanced officer than most presented in the book, and, from the afterword, than many had been in reality. Following two World Wars, and particularly the atrocities of the Second, it was very easy indeed to demonise the entire German nation. British publications for military and other personnel going to Germany as part of its administrative partition following the war, were specifically instructed NOT to get pally with the natives but to make sure they knew their place as a defeated nation.

Lewis Morgan, the central character in the book, rather than unthinkingly throwing out the Lubeck family whose palatial house has been requisitioned, elects to share the accommodation. I was moved, in the afterword, to discover that the seeds of the story came from Brook’s own grandfather, who had done just that, sharing a requisitioned house with a German family for 5 years. This may not seem anything unusual, at the time, it really was, given the strength of anti-German feeling, and the automatic assumption that to be German meant to be a Nazi.

In the story, Lewis, a complex man, his very anti-German wife Rachael, and their young son Edmund, have their own troubled family dynamics, following the death of Michael, the eldest son, in a completely random bombing raid, where German pilots discharged bombs which had not been dropped on targeted raids. The German family, patrician Stefan Lubert and his bitter, quasi Nazi sympathising young daughter Freda, are also struggling to deal with death, as Frau Lubert  also died in a bombing raid. The dynamics are set to unfold in some ways which might be predictable, and some which might be less predictable.

What worked very well in the book was the depiction of the harsh struggles to survive and rebuild, for Germany, after the war, and also the complex political machinations, bargains, compromises, negotiations and political chess manoeuvres being played out between principally Russia and America, but also France and Britain, as everyone began to move slowly towards what would be the building of the Berlin wall, and the implacable Iron Curtain. Brook is also good at the nuanced humour to be had out of observations around the British Class System, played out both administratively and personally.

What worked rather less well was one of the predictable plot and relationship dynamics in that shared house, given the characters themselves, so that events did not seem quite appropriate to character, but more to be driven by the desire for a juicy conflictual narratve.

I also did find Brook’s use of language to be jarring at times, as he would make unusual use of complex descriptors, which did not seem to have a natural flow, but seemed a little self-consciously literary, self-consciously using unusual, almost obfuscatory, synonyms

the event was now vague and crepuscular

She could smell his bacony sweat and admire his sinewy, glabrous forearms

He could see the cello of Rachael’s hips

I love learning new words, and being startled and awakened by fresh images – but the delight is in these being precise, and apposite. Although Brook does not indulge in slightly sloppy or ostentatious language a lot, it was enough to irritate

A fellow reviewer, FictionFan, sums this all up best, I think, by pointing out that , from the publicity blurb (see her excellent review of this book)

Bought at a ten-way auction…………………THE AFTERMATH is already being developed as a feature film by Ridley Scott production company

ie, this was in advance of general publication. It does bear the hallmarks, good and bad, of something developed for film, rather more than developed in truthfulness to literary form, and then turned into screenplay. This feels more driven by connecting arresting filmic images, scene cuts, editing etc, with character fleshed and given authenticity by actors, rather than by psychological development in literary form

I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine
The Aftermath Amazon UK
The Aftermath Amazon USA

Stef Penney – The Tenderness of Wolves

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Book Review, Stef Penney, The Tenderness of Wolves

No hype – as revealing, sparkling and spacious as its landscape

This was an extraordinary first novel. Set in Canada in the 1860s, it is primarily (to me, anyway) about displacement. All the characters and communities within this book are ‘out of place’, whether the mainly Scottish settlers, the Norwegian ‘Amish type’ community or the Indians whose identity has been displaced by the more recent settlers.

The central characters also suffer displacement from themselves and their society – almost everyone is an ‘outsider’ in some ways.

Penney constructs a beautifully paced story of physical journey which absolutely mirrors the internal journeys to self discovery of several of the central characters.

The ending is not quite what one yearns for, though it is absolutely as it needs to be, in order to keep faith with itself. When the writer brings the reader to understand and appreciate her characters, we cannot help but want ‘good outcomes’ for them – as in real life we want ‘good outcomes’ for those we care for. However, as in real life, nothing ever really ‘concludes’, and a ‘Hollywood ending’, though it might initially give a sugary, instantaneous comfort rush, so often fails, because it feels inauthentic. And Penney is deeply authentic – we get the ending which she hints at, throughout the book, given her characters, the society they live in, and the environment they endeavour to survive and prosper in. So the ending has left me with a sense of loss, pain, resignation, which again perfectly inhabits the ‘truth’ of her characters.

Amazing sense of landscape, both historical and geographical. It reminded me, in some ways of Guterson’s ‘Snow Falling on Cedar’ – a similar ‘hook’ of the need to solve a crime, and a profound sense of the land itself as a major entity, another character, within the book – almost the land itself is the main character, rather than the human stories which play out against it.

The Tenderness of Wolves Amazon UK
The Tenderness of Wolves Amazon USA

Judith Kerr – A Small Person Far Away

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A Small Person Far Away, Autobiography, Book Review, Judith Kerr

A modest and beautifully crafted finish to Kerr’s trilogy

The final part of Judith Kerr’s Out Of The Hitler Time trilogy, A Small Person Far Away, is as splendid and fascinating a piece of autobiography-turned-into-fiction writing as the previous two, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (Essential Modern Classics) and Bombs on Aunt Dainty

Judith Kerr (fictionalised as Anna in the book) is now in her late 20s, happily married to her scriptwriter husband Nigel Kneale, (fictionalised as Richard) and beginning to make her own journey as a writer.

The structure of this third book is particularly satisfying, as various motifs and minor occurrences serve as little memory portals back to the past ( a beautiful rug, finding the receipt for the rug in her coat pocket during a particularly stressful episode, so there is a hook back to the memory, and the simultaneous experience of then and now) This is all done in a very natural, unforced, organic way. She is a remarkably good writer, there is real psychological depth going on, great observation, a really strong sense of narrative – and the ability to offer startling images in an arresting way, that feels very authentic.

As in the previous books, the major events all happened, but she has crafted and tightened and carefully chosen, I guess, central moments, and pared out and removed padding. I have a sense that her artist’s eye for composition has been put to excellent use in her writing. It’s not that she gets involved in a lot of visual description, it’s more a sense of composing the frame and placement of narrative.

Set mainly in Berlin again, where her mother is now living, the narrative superficially inhabits a very short time frame of a few days in 1956. Anna has returned to Berlin because her mother is seriously ill; this itself is quite complex. The few days coincide with both the Hungarian Uprising and the Suez Crisis – so, again, we are in a time when another war, from two directions, seemed like a distinct possibility. Inevitably for those who lived through one devastating war, so very recently, all those old terrors and memories must have been freshly re-awakened. So, over those days, Anna is constantly revisiting her past.

She suddenly remembered that when she was small, too, she had listened to distant trains in bed. Probably it’s the same line, she thought. Sometimes when she had found herself awake when everyone else was asleep, she had been comforted by the sound of a goods train rumbling interminably through the night. After Hitler, of course, goods trains had carried quite different cargoes to quite different destinations. She wondered if other German children had still been comforted by their sound in the might, not knowing what was inside them. She wondered what had happened to the trains afterwards, if they were still in use

Inevitably, this reminded me of Steve Reich’s Different Trains (You Tube has the Kronos Quartet version – The Smith Quartet version, linked here,  is also very fine indeed)

I like the quiet and rather modest way she drops the reader into chasms and intense reflections, without ostentation

I can’t recommend this trilogy highly enough – and I’m amazed that I had never heard of Kerr until so very recently, when these marvellous books have been around for some time (- perhaps because primarily she became known as a writer and illustrator of books for young children.

A Small Person Far Away Amazon UK
A Small Person Far Away Amazon USA

Sebastian Faulks – Human Traces

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Book Review, Human traces, Sebastian Faulks

Twenty first century English writer, soul of a nineteenth century European

Faulks is a fine and brave writer, perhaps slightly out of time in an age wedded to instant, easy gratification.

This is not a ‘holiday’ read, its a book which asks the reader to work hard and to reflect – which is not particularly something we expect our writers to do to us these days.

This book has a strong focus on the history of mental health approaches in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the philosophical implications of a theory of mind that arose from these treatments. Faulks weaves this into a wider discourse on ‘what it means to be human’ with explorations into anthropology, and the implications of Darwinism and Mendelism.

The breadth and seriousness of his approach (NOT I think just an exposition of ideas or showing off his research) within the novel form reminded me so much of nineteenth century French writers like Zola and Flaubert – and also of the ‘epic Russians’ Tolstoy and Dostoievsky.

There was a time (no I’m not THAT old!) when i expected all writing to be like this – to educate, move, inspire me and cause me to reflect more deeply – but I’m just not used to being asked to work this hard any more!

I am really pleased I accepted the challenge this book sets – perhaps Faulks will drive me back into the arms of those challenging nineteenth century Europeans once more – its actually been great to have this sort of ‘history of high purpose’ in a novel.

And for a book which has a lot of ‘loss’ and heartache within its pages, it left me feeling strangely in awe of us, and our potential – for good, and for ill.

Human Traces Amazon UK
Human Traces Amazon USA

Judith Kerr – Bombs On Aunt Dainty

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Bombs On Aunt Dainty, Book Review, Judith Kerr, Second World War

The girl becomes a woman in a country not quite home

Judith Kerr here continues her wonderful trilogy (this is part 2) in which she turns her own life into fiction.

Judith (given the identity of Anna in the books) was a German Jewish girl who left Germany very early, as a child, with her immediate family, and had settled in England, aged 12 by 1936. That first book, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, was definitely written for children close to 9 or 10 as a minimum age, though its upper age readership widens to include the not so young adult as well as the YA market, as the writing itself, and the viewpoint, though accessible, is deep enough to be experienced and enjoyed at whatever level of understanding the reader possesses. I learned a lot about the life of a refugee, from the child’s eye viewpoint despite being long past childhood.

Pink Rabbit ended as the Kerr family arrived in wet, confusing London.

Bombs on Aunt Dainty covers the period 1936 to the end of the war, and takes Anna, who is a delightful, talented, observant – in the artist’s and writer’s way – girl and young woman, through her adolescence and into life as a young woman, including that delirious and heady period of `first love’ where intensity of feeling is overwhelming and almost at times too much to bear. It of course adds a particular intensity and irony to the electric sense of being in love with everything, with life itself, as well as the beloved, when this is played out against the background of the Blitz, and when Anna is employed by an organisation which is engaged in exchanging the uniforms of dead soldiers and sailors for new recruits, and she is also part of the firewatching volunteers during the Blitz, seeing death and destruction up close.

Judith/Anna is also discovering herself as a highly gifted artist, and a large part of the book is devoted to her art classes, and her growing excitement and involvement in her particular life path. Paradoxically, as she becomes more and more sure of her `English’ identity, she becomes aware that her parents, who once were gods and took care of her as they negotiated the escape from Germany and the refugee life in Switzerland, France and England, become, once Britain enters the war, more and more displaced people, more and more finding their original nationality creating problems. Anna passes absolutely as an English born and bred young women – until of course she encounters officialdom and background checks.

This book absolutely fizzes – Anna’s is so lively, intelligent, naïve, hungry to learn and eat up life – but it also dips into despair and a sense of the meaninglessness of life, the personal suffering which can overwhelm anyone at times, making the `in love with it all’ feel like an unbearable sham. Teens and twenties absolutely a time of the rollercoaster between the twin poles of love and death, which humanistic psychotherapists are often engaged in working with, with their adult clients.

Here is Anna/Judith electrified by her first experience of seeing an exhibition of the Impressionists, after which:

She spent hours looking at a book about the French Impressionists…..and some of the reproductions so delighted her that it was almost as though she could feel them with her eyes. When there was music on the radio in the lounge it seemed to her unbearably beautiful, and the sight of the dead men’s clothes at work made her unbearably sad. (but even this was curiously agreeable)

Later, due to a combination of events, she goes through a period of profound despair, and searches to find any point to any of it, thinking of the terrible events of the war and the way her parents’ cultured, meaningful lives stopped, and they became refugees, living hand to mouth. In a conversation with her father, he offers another viewpoint:

The chief point about these last, admittedly wretched years……is that it is infinitely better to be alive that dead. Another is that if I had not lived through them I would never have known what it felt like……..To be poor, even desperate, in a cold, foggy country where the natives, though friendly, gargle some kind of Anglo-Saxon dialect…..I’m a writer,…A writer has to know….There is a piece of me, quite separate from the rest, like a little man sitting in my forehead. And whatever happens, he just watches. Even if it’s something terrible. He notices how I feel……and he says, how interesting! How interesting to know that this is what it feels like

Anna/Judith is beautifully soulful and beautifully present to the authenticity of embracing all of it.

I look forward with delight to the third and final volume

Bombs On Aunt Dainty Amazon UK
Bombs On Aunt Dainty Amazon USA

Tutti Frutti

Tags

BBC Scotland, Emma Thompson, Glasgow, John Byrne, Maurice Roeves, Richard Wilson, Robbie Coltrane, Tony Smith, Tutti Frutti, TV Drama Series

Oh glorious, hysterically funny knife edging with pain and tragedy simultaneously

I remember being GLUED to this when it was first broadcast, and again on a rerun some I think 10 years later…..but like its many other fans was left wanting the ability to watch again (and again!) whenever I, as opposed to the schedulers, wanted.

It felt at the time a remarkable programme, all credit to John Byrne’s script, Tony Smith’s direction, Andy Park’s production and performances by a fabulous, stellar cast, headed by Robbie Coltrane and Emma Thompson, who are well matched in the scene-stealing stakes by the likes of Richard Wilson, Katy Murphy, and particularly Maurice Roeves as the hellishly accident and prostrate-by-lust prone lead guitarist Vincent.

The fortunes of the never quite made it 60s rock and roll band the Majestics, desperately still trying to scratch a living in the 80s, receding hairlines, middle-aged bellies and all is a fabulous mix of the gritty and fantastical.

Curiously, whilst being AS enamoured of it as I was back in 86 I have a bit more trouble with some of the very fast paced exchanges – Back in the 80s I travelled round more, including some time spent working in Glasgow, so had no problems in comprehending what was said. Glaswegian – in common with pretty well all city accents, is delivered at a lick, so it can take a little while to adjust your ears – and with dialogue this tight and punchy, delivered with a fast and furious throw away, you really won’t want to miss a single line ! Nice that DVDs offer a subtitle if you need it – though I prefered to watch each episode a couple of times to make sure I’ve missed nothing – the performances warrant that anyway. They are that good.

However, for those without access to Region 2 Players, a cut up version exists of the whole series on You Tube I’ve linked Episode 1, Part 1 which will give a taster or the wonderful juxtaposition of mordant humour, pathos, wit , strange and wonderful images – and great music. But, be warned, the You Tube videos are not subtitled, – plus it IS annoying to run to the end of a clip every 5 minutes or so and have to search for the next Part of the same episode to watch

There are some similarities with another BBC Scotland production of the 90s – which equally carved out a sure road in black comedy, heartbreak and searing performances, balancing realism with something on the tightrope of caricature – edgy, brave, on the edge work Takin’ Over The Asylum [1994] [DVD] This latter once again with the wonderful Katy Murphy, Ken Stott and a beautiful, vulnerable lead performance from a young David Tennant.

BBC Scotland, you rock!

Tutti Frutti Amazon UK
Tutti Frutti Amazon USA

However, for those across the pond, this marvellous series, whilst available, is only for those with Region 2/Europe Players

Flora Rheta Schreiber – Sybil

Tags

Book Review, Dr Cornelia Wilbur, Flora Rheta Schreiber, Psychoanalysis, Shirley Ardell Mason, Sybil

More of the cells in our bodies do not share our DNA than are ‘us’ – we are indeed all multiples

I read this fascinating account of dissociation and fragmentation into multiple personalities many years ago, but have just re-read it, after reading a completely different kind of book (a novel) which dealt with the subject, and was, in my opinion, a poor book.

It did perform the valuable service of sending me back to Flora Rheta Schreiber’s account of the psychoanalysis of ‘Sybil’ a 16 multiple personality. Sybil was analysed by Dr Cornelia Wilbur in the 1950s. Schreiber was a journalist and writer who specialised in the field of psychiatry. Her book was initially published in the 70s

It was an extremely fascinating re-read: the book had made a very strong impression on me, raising as it did questions about identity, however the re-read shows me much about my own development and understanding, as some questions which puzzled me on first reading have been answered as my own shifting perceptions about the nature of healing and holism have grown, and, perhaps, I have a greater personal understanding of the observer as an identity: a concept of the reflective mind which can stand outside the sometimes suffering deeply subjective and reactive self, and observe what is arising.

Without wishing to spoil the fascinating journey which awaits the reader of this well written book, which was written with the agreement of course of both the analysand (integrated Sybil) and her analyst, the basic overview is as follows:

Born in the 1920s into a rigid, repressed Christian sect household, in Wisconsin, with a history of mental illness, particularly on her mother’s side, Sybil had an extraordinary and terrible childhood visited on her by her mother, who was later diagnosed as schizophrenic. Hattie, like Sybil herself, was highly intelligent and creative, but her own background was also one which warped and stifled her. Hattie was a terrifyingly cruel and vengeful woman, from an early age. Sybil’s father, Willard, was complicit in his daughter’s illness, which began at the age of 3, by failing to acknowledge Sybil’s mistreatment and by being too fixated on his standing within the rigid, narrow-minded community and its hellfire-and-damnation faith.

Blue Is The Colour of Love – Artwork by ‘Sybil’ – Shirley Ardell Mason

On my initial reading, I completely understood the ‘normal’ roots of multiple personalities. We are all ‘multiples’ : how often might any of us use such terminology as ‘part of me (for example) loves socialising, but another part of me craves solitude and I need to be alone for periods of time in order to stay whole ’ – so, we are all a mix of sometimes contradictory needs. Yet the ‘normal’ contradictions of part of me, part of me, are cohered into the sense that overall is an ‘I’ who contains these parts.

On first reading, I also clearly understood and had familiarity with the idea, in Jungian terms, of ‘the shadow’ – those aspects of self we might not wish to own – mainly emotions which are felt to be unacceptable or shameful. We all have shadow aspects, according to what our own upbringing and culture deems is acceptable or not – and indeed what is deemed acceptable depending on society’s view of gender, and how women or men are supposed to be.

The difference between disassociation and the conscious or unconscious holding of the shadow however, is that, however uncomfortable, for most of us, we might fly into a destructive rage and be ‘beside myself with rage’ (there’s the inherent normal arising of the shadow within our language) – an indication that the raging one stands at a slight remove from the everyday ‘me’ – but the ‘me’ always knows that however beside myself I might have been – I broke the crockery in my rage. Me, not another, I own and remember it when I calm down, say sorry – and pay for replacements!

However, sometimes, and it is particularly as a result of huge traumatic, often huge traumatically repeated early events, particularly if these occur within the family itself, and even more particularly when the family denies the reality of what the child experienced, or even dis-allows the arising emotions, then the strange way out is to split off from self, in order to allow another to hold the emotion. The original personality may NOT EVEN KNOW that this has happened. This was certainly the case with ‘Sybil’ where early dissociated personalities ‘held’ her anger and her fear, for example.

What I did not completely understand until much later, on this re-read – it had interested me for many years – is that one of her personalities, the one who ‘knew’ all the others, the observant watcher, was extremely ‘whole’ I could not understand intellectually how this attractive person was hidden from ‘Sybil’. But that was before experiencing how mind functions within meditation, and how the observer can even observe the observer observing – degrees of integration of ‘self’-and-not-self.

Even more potently, I have come to understand something which is fundamental within vitalism and holism, namely, that whatever the dis-ease, there is an inherent movement towards health within all living organisms – this is in psyche as evidently as it is in soma. The concept is that of homeostasis and balance, and is always evident, from the most structural nuts-and-bolts of biology (the skin’s ability to repair itself, for example) to the most intangible, within subtle or energetic structures.

In the light of this, the existence of those personalities who seemed MORE than the depleted Sybil made sense. The most complete of her personalities, –  of course, they were all ‘her’ – even acted as co-therapist.

Our medical model inevitably makes us focus on ‘where is the lesion’ – where does fracture or unwellness lie. This of course is extremely important – but just as important, particularly in the field of psyche, is to ask ‘where is the health, and to find that impulse to health, wholeness and cohesion which is within any living organism. Indeed, wider than that even – it is the forces within the structure of matter itself, the material universe, which contains the binding together and the flying apart.

What a very valuable new as well as revisited journey this fabulous book gave me!

‘Sybil’ (her true identity within the book was kept hidden, Dr Wilbur’s identity is what it was – and all 3 women are now dead) was also turned into a couple of made for TV movies.

Cornelia Wilbur

Sybil’s story continues to haunt and stir up controversy. After all three women (‘Sybil’ herself, her analyst, and the writer of the book) had died, a book was written claiming that the 3 women had perpetuated a hoax. It is of course interesting that the writer of THAT book did not write her book until the participants were no longer able to answer back – or sue!

Another writer who befriended ‘Sybil’ wrote a book which verified the original story and included further testimony from people who knew ‘Sybil’ and her family. This book also refutes the evidence presented in the ‘hoax’ book. Clearly, one part had some agenda, and both the readers of the original book, the hoax book and the refutation of hoax book will be convinced, or not convinced, and become partisan of one side or another – or say ‘whatever’

This feeds into debates about ‘false memory syndrome’ – sure, absolutely FMS does exist, and highly suggestible subjects can uncover ‘memory’ can seek to ‘please’ a therapist by giving them the story they expect to find. To acknowledge that however should not negate stories of childhood abuse. There has been a tendency for hardline ‘false memory syndrome’ champions to therefore say all stories of this ilk are false.

Sybil’s own story links with this – and the existence of ‘multiples’ – now described as the more clinical dissociative personality disorder, has, with reclassification, been similarly questioned as to its integrity.

That there was real warmth and trust which developed between Sybil and her therapist, so the relationship became as much friend as doctor patient, is obvious. Sybil certainly was dreadfully damaged by her childhood, and her therapist, who related to her less clinically than most mainstream analysts would these days find professional, may make a modern practitioner hiss in disapproval. But it has always also been true that, if it is in the best interests of the client, some ‘rules’ may be better broken, on very rare occasions ‘Boundaries’ are an important, crucial cornerstone of practice. However Dr Wilbur’s clear regard for Sybil (and the Sybils) as a person, rather than purely coolly offering support and encouragement and acceptance to a client because of professionalism, seems to have been quite hugely instrumental in Sybil’s healing.

Its important to say the ‘broken boundaries’ were not in any way abusive, or exploitative, but Wilbur and Sybil (and Flora Rheta Schreiber) became friends and met outside the therapy sessions. Not something which most therapists would feel appropriate, but in this complex case, Sybil, who had never trusted, who became afraid of all intimacy, learned she could trust in large part through Wilbur’s friendship, encouragement and support outside sessions. Wilbur even treated Sybil for free for a long time, and this was an act of faith FOR Sybil that at some point, she would heal enough to work, to express her creativity and be paid for it, and so in the end be able to pay for those sessions

Wilbur had hidden Sybil’s identity. The later books reveal Sybil to have been Shirley A. Mason

Flora Rheta Schreiber

As stated above, I was fascinated by this book decades ago, and still remain so

Sybil Amazon UK
Sybil Amazon USA