Shovelling Again

My poor lovely spouse had to give up on putting the shovels away as we got another snowstorm over the weekend. She’s normally such a sunny person who always sees the glass as half full. So when the snow has got her grumpy, winter has officially overstayed its welcome. The cats are a bit confused too. Last week, they were taking their first supervised steps into the garden, but now the cold blows in every time the door opens and sends them running to the bedroom and the duvet that we haven’t managed to put away yet.

A Bit of a Revival

Caroline Blackwood is a writer that has been underappreciated for years, but has recently been rediscovered and has experienced a revival. I first encountered her writing in McNally’s re-issue of The Stepdaughter, and I loved how Blackwood could pack so many layers into such a short novel. So I was excited to try another of her books, The Fate of Mary Rose.

Blackwood uses a bit higher of a page count to delve into even more complexity as she uses the brutal rape and murder of a young girl to explore both violence against women and female-perpetrated violence. It’s a disturbing book, but it has a lot to say that not many writers, even modernly, have the guts to put on paper.

Violence Against Women

The narrator is Rowan Anderson, a historian who has a wife he doesn’t love and a child he barely knows living apart from him in a small village. When a little girl is raped and murdered, Anderson’s wife, Cressida, becomes obsessed with the crime, with dire consequences for the child. Blackwood examines the impact of violence against women across generations through the forces that fuel Cressida’s increasingly severe mental illness and that drove her to Anderson in the first place.

It’s a narrative with a lot of twists and turns as Blackwood explores different reactions to crimes against women, both amongst women as well as the community and the world at large.

Not About Men

Blackwood tells this story through Anderson’s perspective, and she uses this male perspective to examine how men tend to react to crimes perpetrated against women as well as women’s very real fear of this violence. She also uses the male perspective to show how disconnected it is from what is going on and the lack of impetus to either confront the problem or do anything that would effect a change.

The technique is effective, but when all was said and done, I found it a bit limiting as well. The novel did not feel quite finished because it did not involve a female perspective from the inside. I understand that that was part of Blackwood’s point, but there’s a feeling of absence that goes beyond the point quite a bit and makes it feel incomplete. Sometimes this even veers into feeling like there are too many excuses made for men and their lack of involvement or connectedness with this issue. That’s not the intention, but the perspective makes it hard to escape the whispers of this interpretation — especially when it lends itself to a caricaturing of the female characters as well.

Also? It’s just frustrating to read an entire book from a perspective that has power but does nothing with it. Again, that is the point, but I found the book too long for the effect, and nearly impossible to read at points.

When Will It Melt?

The answer to this question is soon, but why does soon feel so damn far away? March is such a strange month, sometimes. This year, Bunny Day is early too and there have been so many deadlines to deal with. My brain feels like a soup of barely remembered appointments and a task list that keeps changing with the weather.