Out & About January 2018

OA books

HELEN SHEEHAN and LISSA GIBBINS are captivated by Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore. Dunmore’s last novel before she died, it is both an intriguing mystery, set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, and a study of lives lost and along with them their contribution to the changing world Walks of life Lizzie Fawkes has grown up in radical circles where each step of the French Revolution is followed with eager idealism. But she has recently married John Diner Tredevant, a property developer who is heavily invested in Bristol’s housing boom, and he has everything to lose from social upheaval and the prospect of war. Soon his plans for a magnificent terrace built above the 200ft drop of the Gorge come under threat. Diner believes that Lizzie’s independent, questioning spirit must be coerced and subdued. She belongs to him: law and custom confirm it, and she must live as he wants. In a tense drama of public and private violence, resistance and terror, Diner’s passion for Lizzie darkens until she finds herself dangerously alone.

L ate 18th-century England was a time of social upheaval, as the French Revolution cast its terrifying shadow over the order of English society. There was a very real prospect of war and that brought inevitable uncertainty to all aspects of life. Against this tumultuous backdrop this brilliant novel, set in Bristol, tells the story of Lizzie Fawkes, her family and her disastrous marriage to John Diner Tredevant (known as Diner). Lizzie, our narrator, has inherited an independent and questioning mind from her mother, Julia, a radical 18th-century writer. “There was nothing more important than that those ideas of hers should be captured and set down.” Lizzie and her mother, who she calls Mammie, are very close. Much to Mammie’s dismay Lizzie has recently married Diner, a property developer, of some renown. This is Diner’s second marriage; his first wife, Lucie, died while visiting her family in France. Diner has bought some land in Clifton and started work on a beautiful row of houses with breathtaking views of the Avon: “The site was magnificent but it was also steep and uneven”. He has sunk all his money into this project, but the constant rumours of a war with France are adversely affecting the housing market. Although he intends to make his fortune from these houses Lizzie soon realises money is only part of it: “…his pride in the fine curve of stone that would rear itself where there had only been a scrub of grass and hawthorn… even Mammie would see the glory of the high- slung terrace as it floated above the Gorge”. Diner loves his wife, to the point of distraction, but is disdainful of Mammie and her household.

He does not trust her forward-thinking ideas, does not like her husband, Lizzie’s stepfather Augustus, or her companion Hannah, “Only when he was alone with me did he blaze out against the ruin that radicalism would bring”. As the property market collapses and Diner’s buyers fall away he makes it increasingly difficult for Lizzie to visit her beloved Mammie and his desire to control all aspects of Lizzie’s life escalates alarmingly. To add to the tension, Lizzie becomes suspicious of what has really happened to Diner’s first wife, “Lucie had gone away in haste and perhaps in anger. It was possible she had not meant to return”. Helen Dunmore’s characters are finely drawn and the sense of danger, both from the wider world, and from Diner himself, is always present, “The truth was that there were moments when I feared him…my body prickled and would not settle”. Lizzie is a kind and loyal daughter, and tries hard to be a good wife, but her independent spirit and her love for her mother, who is in a delicate condition, compel her to disobey her menacing husband. Mammie is passionate about her writing and in particular about the events in France and what they could mean for England. “What happened across the Channel was not obscure to us, since the cause of radicalism in England hung on the fate of France”. Each character in this book is intricately linked to the gorge around them, the fear and unease caused by the French Revolution, and Diner’s frightening and sinister flights of fancy. Bristol in the 1790s is a city surrounded by deep ravines, woods and gorges “…the sheer drop of limestone crags, down to the Portway hundreds of feet below”.

There was a building boom and fierce competition to carve up the land and build houses. Once war was declared in 1793, the boom collapsed and according to Dunmore “… more than fifty builders and developers went bankrupt within a few months. Hundreds of houses were left unfinished for years, in a roofless spectacle of ruin”. While Birdcage Walk is a gripping tale of jealousy and disaster on one level, it also examines the value of words, written or unwritten, and how a writer’s work can so easily be lost to future generations. This is particularly poignant as Birdcage Walk is Helen Dunmore’s last book – she died in June 2017, aged only 64. She says in her afterword “In this novel I am writing not only about a particular period of history but also about the ways the individual vanishes from historical record”. Of a lifetime’s work only a scrap of Mammie’s writing remains, given to Lizzie by the loyal Hannah. The author’s fascination with the stories of families and individuals, the sense of place and how historical events impact on them is central to this book, as it was in her highly-acclaimed novels The Siege and its sequel The Betrayal , both set in Russia, during and soon after the Second World War. She mourns the loss of so many personal stories down the centuries, and the lack of records about women, “Women’s lives, in particular, remain largely unrecorded. But even so, did they not shape the future?” . It is a tribute to Helen Dunmore’s wonderful stories, her sensitive writing and her historical detail that her writing will surely be preserved and celebrated for a long time to come.

Helen Sheehan and Lissa Gibbins are writers and owners of Aide Memoire, Great Bedwyn. Inspired by their passion for words, they write memoirs, edit novels and documents and proofread for a wide range of clients. Email: lissa@aidememoire.biz helen@aidememoire.biz

43