Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

An uninvited guest – someone with the potential to bring nightmare into the lives of any one of us. It has been used with such effect by English writer Ian McEwan in Enduring Love where having something in common – being witness to an horrific accident and as ineffectual witness somehow complicit – brings about persistent ensuing contact that oppresses both mind and spirit. Similarly in the late Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party an unobtrusive nobody is chased from his humdrum existence by two criminals who ‘glide’ into his life. Alison Jean Lester was born in California, but spent twelve years of her young life in Massachusetts. She is far from being an uninvited guest in our community of West Midlands readers and writers; she is an integral part of it, settled in Droitwich, Worcestershire and promoting her work through readings in the Black Country and beyond.

In her dark tale, Lester has more in common with the dramatist than the novelist. The setting semi-rural Massachusetts, the season late-autumn, the initial action the arrival, out of the darkness, of a man claiming to be the narrator’s brother-in-law. The narrator’s wife is about to return from Norway but the period is pre-internet so the only means of affirming the identity of the supposed relative is by landline and she has left her hotel. He claims to be her never-previously-mentioned half-brother. Immediately he establishes himself in the couple’s home. From then on the narrative centres on who this charming, engaging, capable man truly is.

Other characters are finely-drawn too, not least the narrator’s frail, beautiful wife. But the figure of Morten towers with a menace that underlies credible friendliness and formidable problem-solving strength. I have never, though, read a novel where psychiatry provides the turning-point. Here the processes, and indeed the practitioners, are presented with admirable clarity. I never knew that memory-loss, of a sudden kind, was an understood medical condition; this book shows both the clinical and the psychological investigations. In a literary sense however the uncovering of the past is seen as a necessary process in order to recover a full future. All the same, the novel inevitably ends with a question-mark.

Creating mood and anticipatory dread, the writer works with close inflections of characters’ speech. She’d be at home scripting for stage or screen but is a novelist through and through. She watches her characters: their food, their clothes, their movements – ‘Glide’, the book’s title, refers to skating on ice in the frozen Massachusetts winter. It is also the subtle insinuation of the character Morten into the lives of his hosts. What sounds like ‘glide’? The reader gets to see the resonances of the word as the story progresses.

It could also suggest the reader’s rapid absorption in the story; you glide with the characters as events pile up on them. The skilfully-shaped prose is immediately arresting. Unable to separate myself from it, I read it all largely in a day. And something else. This publication is a triumph of printing artistry. The monochrome photographs on facing-pages of chapter-beginnings, abstract in the main, lend themselves to the narrative uniquely. The papers are heavy and the covers protect. This artefact of a novel really should cost more.