Scan barcode
jessicah95's review
4.0
A combination of Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves, and Jade Sharma's Problems.
McClory's self-confessed unlikeable heroine is equal parts unreliable and erratic in her narration. The prose is searingly vulnerable, experimental, and often challenging. What starts out as a pretty atypical narrative (a grieving young woman embarking on a road trip to find herself), soon twists into a downward spiral of something more compellingly sinister.
I was provided with an eBook of this through Netgalley (many moons ago), in exchange for an honest review, but I had since bought myself a paperback anyway.
McClory's self-confessed unlikeable heroine is equal parts unreliable and erratic in her narration. The prose is searingly vulnerable, experimental, and often challenging. What starts out as a pretty atypical narrative (a grieving young woman embarking on a road trip to find herself), soon twists into a downward spiral of something more compellingly sinister.
I was provided with an eBook of this through Netgalley (many moons ago), in exchange for an honest review, but I had since bought myself a paperback anyway.
aligeorge's review
4.0
The dedication at the start of Flesh of the Peach is 'to all the unlikeable women in fiction and outwith it', which gives you a sense of what the author is going for with her female protagonist Sarah Browne. This is a story about grief and anger and what comes after, but Eat Pray Love it is not.
When we meet Sarah she is going through some stuff. Crying at the top of the Empire State Building, in fact. In another book, this would surely be her meet cue. But it's not. The death of her mother has just coincided with the death of her relationship and she is trying to work out what to do next. As we follow her journey, we learn that she does not really deal with grief or trauma - she bottles until her sadness expresses itself as rage.
The narrative is episodic, flipping between Sarah in the present as she moves to New Mexico to start a new life and Sarah's childhood in Cornwall and young adulthood in London. The chapters are very short, the language often poetic - occasionally to the point of opaqueness. The structure seems to very deliberately preclude the reader getting into Sarah's head, because she herself feels quite detached and does things in almost a dreamlike way (as discussed she doesn't deal with emotions well). We don't really get into detail about the supporting characters, they are seen through Sarah's eyes and she's not really empathetic enough to want to learn about their motivation. She's still trying to figure out her own, in fairness. There are the briefest glimpses of American Psycho here in the sense that Sarah does not behave in the way you might expect, and yet people don't seem to notice or care.
This is a portrait of loss and lack of resolution, told in poetic prose. I think it's a really interesting debut novel, and I'm excited to read more unlikeable women from Helen McClory in the future.
When we meet Sarah she is going through some stuff. Crying at the top of the Empire State Building, in fact. In another book, this would surely be her meet cue. But it's not. The death of her mother has just coincided with the death of her relationship and she is trying to work out what to do next. As we follow her journey, we learn that she does not really deal with grief or trauma - she bottles until her sadness expresses itself as rage.
The narrative is episodic, flipping between Sarah in the present as she moves to New Mexico to start a new life and Sarah's childhood in Cornwall and young adulthood in London. The chapters are very short, the language often poetic - occasionally to the point of opaqueness. The structure seems to very deliberately preclude the reader getting into Sarah's head, because she herself feels quite detached and does things in almost a dreamlike way (as discussed she doesn't deal with emotions well). We don't really get into detail about the supporting characters, they are seen through Sarah's eyes and she's not really empathetic enough to want to learn about their motivation. She's still trying to figure out her own, in fairness. There are the briefest glimpses of American Psycho here in the sense that Sarah does not behave in the way you might expect, and yet people don't seem to notice or care.
This is a portrait of loss and lack of resolution, told in poetic prose. I think it's a really interesting debut novel, and I'm excited to read more unlikeable women from Helen McClory in the future.
lichenbitten's review
4.0
An exquisitely written debut novel. McClory crafts gorgeous sentences that pull you deeply into a novel that's about grief, fury, and the ghosts of the past. I interviewed McClory for Burning House Press. We talked about gender, unlikable women, and much more:
https://burninghousepress.com/2017/03/21/an-interview-with-helen-mcclory/
https://burninghousepress.com/2017/03/21/an-interview-with-helen-mcclory/
emiliepichot's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
nakutski's review
4.0
Review to follow in my blog sometime this week! Meanwhile you can also read a copy on NetGalley or purchase the hardcopy after the 25th of April! :)
UPDATE:
Full review can be found here - https://kinomanicfae.wordpress.com/2017/04/19/flesh-of-the-peach-a-dense-and-intricate-dessert-by-helen-mcclory/
UPDATE:
Full review can be found here - https://kinomanicfae.wordpress.com/2017/04/19/flesh-of-the-peach-a-dense-and-intricate-dessert-by-helen-mcclory/
blankgarden's review
3.0
My review: https://theblankgarden.com/2017/10/10/nostalgia-was-like-a-vine-strangling-her-sickly-scented/
balancinghistorybooks's review
3.0
Scottish author Helen McClory won both the Saltire Award and the Scottish First Book of the Year Award for her initial publication, a short story collection entitled On the Edges of Vision. Her debut novel, Flesh of the Peach, is described in its blurb as a 'stunning, intense and deeply moving investigation into the effects of toxic grief'. Kirsty Logan, whom I believe to be one of the most exciting voices in contemporary fiction, deems it 'bold and unflinching', comparing it to 'A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing meets Inside Llewyn Davis: A brutal, clear-eyed study of a failing artist that shatters our expectations of what a woman should be.'
Flesh of the Peach follows a twenty seven-year-old artist named Sarah Browne. In New York, the tumultuous end of her relationship with a married woman coincides with the death of her 'estranged, aristocratic' mother. She is left with rather a lot of money, and swathes of grief, which she feels quite unable to deal with. The book essentially depicts Sarah's existential crisis, as she takes off across the United States on a Greyhound bus, from her home in New York to a cabin of her mother's in secluded New Mexico.
When she sets off, the following reasoning with herself occurs:
'Are we doing this then, she asked herself.
The question was vague because she herself was vague. It becomes a lyric in a city like this one. Sarah's lover Kennedy had just severed ties. Kennedy had been everything for a while there.
... Her mother was dead back home in England, that was the other thing. Finally, after a slow dance with cancer. And long after their relationship had died.'
She goes on to think about the family pile back in Cornwall, where she grew up, and clearly never felt as though she belonged: 'But you remain on the threshold, the door never opens, never shuts behind. You are outside and you can go no further. And this outsideness, the jags of memory, fit into your skill to be lodged there, for however long.' Sarah strives to move as far away from her old life as she can, searching for the 'best possible version' of herself, and trying her utmost to be at peace with both her body and her place in the world.
Some of the prose within Flesh of the Peach is immeasurably beautiful, but an odd balance has been struck with its many choppy, sometimes unfinished sentences. The often very short chapters serve to exacerbate this; they oscillate between present and past, and thus Sarah's story does tend to feel a little jumbled at times. These sections are interspersed with short intervals detailing what she plans to do with her money; the suggestions thrown up are sometimes sensible, and sometimes utterly wild and strange. The really interesting thing about the construction of Flesh of the Peach, however, is the way in which it is told using a mixture of traditional and experimental narrative. This playing around with form is certainly one of McClory's strengths here.
The depiction of Sarah's unravelling, and her struggles to stay afloat is believable for the most part, but I felt rather removed from our protagonist whilst reading about her. The third person omniscient voice is effective in terms of relaying the roadtrip which she takes, and the memories which flood into her mind at intervals, but despite the crisis of knowing herself which takes place, I did not feel as though she was as fully fleshed out as she perhaps could have been. There was an insurmountable barrier between Sarah and I; yes, I could watch her and her actions, and could understand the situation in which she found herself, but it still did not make some of the actions which she took that plausible, or in character.
Flesh of the Peach is a story which both champions and degrades love, and all of its many forms. Whilst the characters are largely interesting, we do not learn enough about the majority of them, and despite the third person narration, we see them only through Sarah's eyes; we are thus given rather a skewed interpretation of other people. With regard to Sarah, we as readers are always aware of her; her life, her behaviour, her thoughts, and her feelings are continually woven together. Despite its strengths, Flesh of the Peach did not quite live up to its premise. Regardless, I look forward to reading more of McClory's work in future, as I have a feeling that she is definitely an author to watch.
Flesh of the Peach follows a twenty seven-year-old artist named Sarah Browne. In New York, the tumultuous end of her relationship with a married woman coincides with the death of her 'estranged, aristocratic' mother. She is left with rather a lot of money, and swathes of grief, which she feels quite unable to deal with. The book essentially depicts Sarah's existential crisis, as she takes off across the United States on a Greyhound bus, from her home in New York to a cabin of her mother's in secluded New Mexico.
When she sets off, the following reasoning with herself occurs:
'Are we doing this then, she asked herself.
The question was vague because she herself was vague. It becomes a lyric in a city like this one. Sarah's lover Kennedy had just severed ties. Kennedy had been everything for a while there.
... Her mother was dead back home in England, that was the other thing. Finally, after a slow dance with cancer. And long after their relationship had died.'
She goes on to think about the family pile back in Cornwall, where she grew up, and clearly never felt as though she belonged: 'But you remain on the threshold, the door never opens, never shuts behind. You are outside and you can go no further. And this outsideness, the jags of memory, fit into your skill to be lodged there, for however long.' Sarah strives to move as far away from her old life as she can, searching for the 'best possible version' of herself, and trying her utmost to be at peace with both her body and her place in the world.
Some of the prose within Flesh of the Peach is immeasurably beautiful, but an odd balance has been struck with its many choppy, sometimes unfinished sentences. The often very short chapters serve to exacerbate this; they oscillate between present and past, and thus Sarah's story does tend to feel a little jumbled at times. These sections are interspersed with short intervals detailing what she plans to do with her money; the suggestions thrown up are sometimes sensible, and sometimes utterly wild and strange. The really interesting thing about the construction of Flesh of the Peach, however, is the way in which it is told using a mixture of traditional and experimental narrative. This playing around with form is certainly one of McClory's strengths here.
The depiction of Sarah's unravelling, and her struggles to stay afloat is believable for the most part, but I felt rather removed from our protagonist whilst reading about her. The third person omniscient voice is effective in terms of relaying the roadtrip which she takes, and the memories which flood into her mind at intervals, but despite the crisis of knowing herself which takes place, I did not feel as though she was as fully fleshed out as she perhaps could have been. There was an insurmountable barrier between Sarah and I; yes, I could watch her and her actions, and could understand the situation in which she found herself, but it still did not make some of the actions which she took that plausible, or in character.
Flesh of the Peach is a story which both champions and degrades love, and all of its many forms. Whilst the characters are largely interesting, we do not learn enough about the majority of them, and despite the third person narration, we see them only through Sarah's eyes; we are thus given rather a skewed interpretation of other people. With regard to Sarah, we as readers are always aware of her; her life, her behaviour, her thoughts, and her feelings are continually woven together. Despite its strengths, Flesh of the Peach did not quite live up to its premise. Regardless, I look forward to reading more of McClory's work in future, as I have a feeling that she is definitely an author to watch.
arirang's review
3.0
And then after that. She would make sure her life would no longer be a sentence fragment or shackled to metaphors, but a steady drawing forward and one day back, back home.
Freight Books is a small UK independent publisher “With a focus on publishing high quality literary fiction … [with] a commitment to compelling narratives, scrupulous editing, high quality production and imaginative marketing, supported by a strong and identifiable brand”.
Helen McClory’s Flesh of the Peach is her debut novel, written before but published after she had made a name for herself in short stories and flash fiction.
Wonderfully, the book is dedicated “To all the unlikable women in fiction and outwith it.”
As she has explained elsewhere:
In the same interview, when asked to recommend a book, she references a more contemporary example of the unlikable woman character, Helen in Patty Yumi Cottrell’s [b:Sorry to Disrupt the Peace|31213490|Sorry to Disrupt the Peace|Patty Yumi Cottrell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1476987443s/31213490.jpg|51868021] (one of my books of 2017). And from my recent reading (and recent award shortlists) Eileen in Eileen, Neve in First Love and Mattie in History of Wolves are other obvious examples.
McClory’s Sarah (as an aside, named Astral is earlier versions of the story - see e.g. http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/tennessee-stop/, a name which has a rather different feel) is another in the same mould, but with some interesting differences.
Firstly McClory has chosen to use subjective third person rather than first person narration, which initially I found a little artificial, but on reflection actually works quite effectively as it allows some limited narrative distancing.
Secondly, and as more of a personal view, McClory to me made a brave decision to make Sarah unlikable – difficult to like - rather than dislikable – very possible to strongly dislike. Most of the other contemporary examples fall into the latter camp – the characters almost go out of their way to be unpleasant, there is plenty of black humour, and I at least couldn’t help but secretly like most of them, whereas Sarah is just unlikable.
Related to that, while Sarah has clearly had a very troubled relationship with her mother, she also comes from a life of relative privilege.
She had done so well in the local school.
She had hidden at the front of class.
She had been privileged to live in a mansion.
She contracted bronchitis every February.
She couldn’t speak because every word she spoke was privilege, she couldn’t stop herself speaking because she was lonely, hopeful. She was the daughter of a famous, popular artist. An unacknowledged daughter of a Japanese-American art lover
The novel opens with Sarah Browne (*), in her late twenties, British but living away from her family in New York (She had left that all long ago and was different now), and at the top of the Empire State Building. Her married lover “Kennedy” (that Sarah doesn’t actually know her first name is itself rather emblematic) has just abruptly ended their relationship after her husband found out about it (Sarah suspects at Kennedy’s volition) and almost at the same time, while working in a cafe, Sarah received a phone call telling her of the death, back in England, of her mother, Maud.
And that was how Sarah lost her job
And all she was was an émigré deadmother wifefucker in pieces, spines, vibrating at an awful screeching pitch
From there, to the Empire State building. From there, her pieces sent out to be hopeful and reformative – somewhere other.
There was no love lost between Sarah and her mother, and her death means Sarah, her only child, inherits the spacious family home, another family lodge in New Mexico, and the money from Maud’s recent resurgence in popularity as an artist. But it still leaves Sarah feeling grief and anger:
But how lucky she was, her mother had left all those millions to her. Just put it in a clean little envelope, Madam Barrister, thank you very much, like a neat towelette slipped alongside the balled-up pink knickers from last night.
She unwrapped another ginger. Sugar rush helped, fire helped. Working the wad against her back teeth, almost choking her. Two paths had emerged. One home across the pond, and another unseen in the American interior beckoning her. It was an easy choice, all considered.
She first undertakes a long road-trip from New York to the family lodge in New Mexico, now hers, first by Greyhound Bus then by hire-car (a car she seems to have no intention of returning):
Here we see the influence of McClory's short-story background as the story is told in brief vignettes - over 100 chapters in 200 pages - with leaps (albeit small) in the narrative, as well as flashbacks to her relationship with her mother.
The road-trip also allows McClory to showcase her descriptive prose and her admiration for the American countryside, if not necessarily for the culture (in Arthur Dent style, she is often in search of a decent cup of tea).
The day was long and hers alone. American lonesome. She stopped at turnoffs, at petrol stations, at viewpoints. She drank juice, she sang to the dashboard. The afternoon yawned and stretched. The landscape altered by degrees that seemed minuscule until they seemed radical.
In New Mexico she meets and forms an uneasy relationship with the similarly troubled Theo, son of the owner of the neighbouring property (largely home to a concealed cannabis farm).
At one point during a road-trip, they visit the Bandelier National Monument, and the remains of the hotel that was once, rather oddly, run inside the historic archaeological site Frijoles Canyon in the 1920s (https://www.nps.gov/band/learn/historyculture/mrs-frey.htm). What a charmingly insouciant and invasive thing to do thinks Sarah and imagines herself as running the hotel and its surrounding fruit farm, the first (I think) of a recurring image of the flesh of a peach that gives the novel its title:
The weight of a home grown peach in a calloused hand. No one else, nothing but that specific, gentle kind of contact, that imagined, tender flesh.
Road-trips aside, Sarah also spends a lot of time alone, thinking:
I was busy masturbating and panicking, she thought. Forward momentum really wasn't my concern.
In particular, there are many flashbacks to her troubled relationship with her mother (rather less to the aftermath of her affair with Kennedy, which seems more implicit). Her mother and her aunt, who lived with them, both drank extensively and while Sarah was used as a model in her mother's painting, her mixed-race origins and black hair were turned into the features of an English rose:
It wasn't really you that Mum immortalised in paint. It was that blonde girl, ethereal, fully white-English. Later Maud would label her 'Little Belle' because it was a name that would work in most markets. You were never more than a prop, a point of reference for Mum's imaginary Little Belle ... once, you scratched off a little of her, just the hair by her face, with your fingernail. Under that top flake of yellow, black hair. Yours.
The narrative is also broken up by interludes of "What She Would Spend Her Money On" often somewhat surreal and troubled:
She would get huge slabs of carcass from best-beloved cattle. Smooth marbled flesh. She would hang these in a specially prepared cellar and frighten herself with their bodies and pungency in the dark. She would buy up old china tea sets, the kind so thin they seem unwell and you fear to hold them. She would never have anything but fires on and drink beef broth to stave all fevers. She would keep a collection of artisan knives and cut the meat for hanging on an antique clockwork roaster that would dangle the carcass part over the fire. She would watch the carcass become meat as it cooked in the huge yellow tiled kitchen. She would eat handfuls of the meat, cooled, bloody, in the salon, all alone, with the window letting in humid air off The Channel. Plush in a chair, chewing. Vases of lilies on coffee tables too high to see if she had guests.
And at the novel's end, she has a rather odd sojourn in Paris, in plot terms to give her practice at being rich as she shops on the Champs Elysee, but gives the author the chance to plug what, to be fair, is the best bookshop I've ever visited, Shakespeare and company.
And underlying the whole novel and Helen's character is a strong air of barely repressed violence - she confesses to an incident with her mother and one senses her relationship with Theo may end similarly.
Overall - 3.5 stars. As mentioned I Helen successfully and bravely (in authorial terms) unlikable but I suspect I won't remember her in time as well as some of the other examples I have mentioned. And while the prose is excellent, the American road-trip parts of the novel felt, at times they belonged in another book.
Rounded up to 4 for now.
Authors website:
https://schietree.wordpress.com/fiction/
Freight Books is a small UK independent publisher “With a focus on publishing high quality literary fiction … [with] a commitment to compelling narratives, scrupulous editing, high quality production and imaginative marketing, supported by a strong and identifiable brand”.
Helen McClory’s Flesh of the Peach is her debut novel, written before but published after she had made a name for herself in short stories and flash fiction.
Wonderfully, the book is dedicated “To all the unlikable women in fiction and outwith it.”
As she has explained elsewhere:
There are loads of real women who get slapped with the label ‘unlikeable’ (the violence of the metaphor is apt, I think). Take your pick – as soon as I write this, another one will be being vilified in the public eye. Sometimes for some actual sin, sometimes for having an awkward personality or a mental illness or the temerity to have a body and some opinions, occasionally clumsily expressed. We can’t escape judgements and judging – the internet is a 24-hour courtroom. For fictional women, I think of Good Morning Midnight’s Sasha Jensen. Miss Jean Brodie. Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy. I think of women written by male authors who get a bit more of a pass – Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Becky Sharp. I think of films packed with scheming dames and femmes fatales and bunny boilers. I think of the way we see women as villains when they are oversized, full of feelings that unsettle, when queer, trans, deformed, not one of ‘us’, old. My book is for all these women and the space they make (and necessarily complicate) for the rest of us.http://thecaledonianovelaward.com/outandabout/
In the same interview, when asked to recommend a book, she references a more contemporary example of the unlikable woman character, Helen in Patty Yumi Cottrell’s [b:Sorry to Disrupt the Peace|31213490|Sorry to Disrupt the Peace|Patty Yumi Cottrell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1476987443s/31213490.jpg|51868021] (one of my books of 2017). And from my recent reading (and recent award shortlists) Eileen in Eileen, Neve in First Love and Mattie in History of Wolves are other obvious examples.
McClory’s Sarah (as an aside, named Astral is earlier versions of the story - see e.g. http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/tennessee-stop/, a name which has a rather different feel) is another in the same mould, but with some interesting differences.
Firstly McClory has chosen to use subjective third person rather than first person narration, which initially I found a little artificial, but on reflection actually works quite effectively as it allows some limited narrative distancing.
Secondly, and as more of a personal view, McClory to me made a brave decision to make Sarah unlikable – difficult to like - rather than dislikable – very possible to strongly dislike. Most of the other contemporary examples fall into the latter camp – the characters almost go out of their way to be unpleasant, there is plenty of black humour, and I at least couldn’t help but secretly like most of them, whereas Sarah is just unlikable.
Related to that, while Sarah has clearly had a very troubled relationship with her mother, she also comes from a life of relative privilege.
She had done so well in the local school.
She had hidden at the front of class.
She had been privileged to live in a mansion.
She contracted bronchitis every February.
She couldn’t speak because every word she spoke was privilege, she couldn’t stop herself speaking because she was lonely, hopeful. She was the daughter of a famous, popular artist. An unacknowledged daughter of a Japanese-American art lover
The novel opens with Sarah Browne (*), in her late twenties, British but living away from her family in New York (She had left that all long ago and was different now), and at the top of the Empire State Building. Her married lover “Kennedy” (that Sarah doesn’t actually know her first name is itself rather emblematic) has just abruptly ended their relationship after her husband found out about it (Sarah suspects at Kennedy’s volition) and almost at the same time, while working in a cafe, Sarah received a phone call telling her of the death, back in England, of her mother, Maud.
And that was how Sarah lost her job
And all she was was an émigré deadmother wifefucker in pieces, spines, vibrating at an awful screeching pitch
From there, to the Empire State building. From there, her pieces sent out to be hopeful and reformative – somewhere other.
There was no love lost between Sarah and her mother, and her death means Sarah, her only child, inherits the spacious family home, another family lodge in New Mexico, and the money from Maud’s recent resurgence in popularity as an artist. But it still leaves Sarah feeling grief and anger:
But how lucky she was, her mother had left all those millions to her. Just put it in a clean little envelope, Madam Barrister, thank you very much, like a neat towelette slipped alongside the balled-up pink knickers from last night.
She unwrapped another ginger. Sugar rush helped, fire helped. Working the wad against her back teeth, almost choking her. Two paths had emerged. One home across the pond, and another unseen in the American interior beckoning her. It was an easy choice, all considered.
She first undertakes a long road-trip from New York to the family lodge in New Mexico, now hers, first by Greyhound Bus then by hire-car (a car she seems to have no intention of returning):
Here we see the influence of McClory's short-story background as the story is told in brief vignettes - over 100 chapters in 200 pages - with leaps (albeit small) in the narrative, as well as flashbacks to her relationship with her mother.
The road-trip also allows McClory to showcase her descriptive prose and her admiration for the American countryside, if not necessarily for the culture (in Arthur Dent style, she is often in search of a decent cup of tea).
The day was long and hers alone. American lonesome. She stopped at turnoffs, at petrol stations, at viewpoints. She drank juice, she sang to the dashboard. The afternoon yawned and stretched. The landscape altered by degrees that seemed minuscule until they seemed radical.
In New Mexico she meets and forms an uneasy relationship with the similarly troubled Theo, son of the owner of the neighbouring property (largely home to a concealed cannabis farm).
At one point during a road-trip, they visit the Bandelier National Monument, and the remains of the hotel that was once, rather oddly, run inside the historic archaeological site Frijoles Canyon in the 1920s (https://www.nps.gov/band/learn/historyculture/mrs-frey.htm). What a charmingly insouciant and invasive thing to do thinks Sarah and imagines herself as running the hotel and its surrounding fruit farm, the first (I think) of a recurring image of the flesh of a peach that gives the novel its title:
The weight of a home grown peach in a calloused hand. No one else, nothing but that specific, gentle kind of contact, that imagined, tender flesh.
Road-trips aside, Sarah also spends a lot of time alone, thinking:
I was busy masturbating and panicking, she thought. Forward momentum really wasn't my concern.
In particular, there are many flashbacks to her troubled relationship with her mother (rather less to the aftermath of her affair with Kennedy, which seems more implicit). Her mother and her aunt, who lived with them, both drank extensively and while Sarah was used as a model in her mother's painting, her mixed-race origins and black hair were turned into the features of an English rose:
It wasn't really you that Mum immortalised in paint. It was that blonde girl, ethereal, fully white-English. Later Maud would label her 'Little Belle' because it was a name that would work in most markets. You were never more than a prop, a point of reference for Mum's imaginary Little Belle ... once, you scratched off a little of her, just the hair by her face, with your fingernail. Under that top flake of yellow, black hair. Yours.
The narrative is also broken up by interludes of "What She Would Spend Her Money On" often somewhat surreal and troubled:
She would get huge slabs of carcass from best-beloved cattle. Smooth marbled flesh. She would hang these in a specially prepared cellar and frighten herself with their bodies and pungency in the dark. She would buy up old china tea sets, the kind so thin they seem unwell and you fear to hold them. She would never have anything but fires on and drink beef broth to stave all fevers. She would keep a collection of artisan knives and cut the meat for hanging on an antique clockwork roaster that would dangle the carcass part over the fire. She would watch the carcass become meat as it cooked in the huge yellow tiled kitchen. She would eat handfuls of the meat, cooled, bloody, in the salon, all alone, with the window letting in humid air off The Channel. Plush in a chair, chewing. Vases of lilies on coffee tables too high to see if she had guests.
And at the novel's end, she has a rather odd sojourn in Paris, in plot terms to give her practice at being rich as she shops on the Champs Elysee, but gives the author the chance to plug what, to be fair, is the best bookshop I've ever visited, Shakespeare and company.
And underlying the whole novel and Helen's character is a strong air of barely repressed violence - she confesses to an incident with her mother and one senses her relationship with Theo may end similarly.
Overall - 3.5 stars. As mentioned I Helen successfully and bravely (in authorial terms) unlikable but I suspect I won't remember her in time as well as some of the other examples I have mentioned. And while the prose is excellent, the American road-trip parts of the novel felt, at times they belonged in another book.
Rounded up to 4 for now.
Authors website:
https://schietree.wordpress.com/fiction/
jackielaw's review
4.0
“If I owned a horse, I feel like I would ride it until it dropped from exhaustian under me,’ Maud said […] ‘I wouldn’t stop until it had given me everything and taken me far further than it could.”
Flesh of the Peach, by Helen McClory, is a story of grief, selfishness, and the lasting damage caused by damaged people. The protagonist is Sarah Browne, a twenty-seven year old aspiring artist who, when the story opens, has been rejected by her married lover on the day she discovers her estranged mother has finally died. Raised in a chaotic household of women, where attention was rare and often caustic, she escaped to London as a teenager and then on to New York, a city she now chooses to leave.
Sarah decides to use her newly acquired inheritance to start again, to move to a cabin in New Mexico where she hopes to find the space to consider what she can now be. She takes with her just a few possessions, including a new yellow sundress, but also decades of emotional baggage that she has worked to suppress.
“She placed the newly purchased dress so that it lay across the bed in a pool like sunshine. […] She was going to dress from now on for a beautiful life. Keep saying those words to yourself. It sounds naive but that is one way to choose to exist. As a polished stone skipped across the harshness of things.”
Sarah’s wish is that she be the best possible version of herself, which is the most that any can aspire to be.
There follows a roadtrip in a Greyhound bus, a stay in a soulless motel, and then a drive to her late mother’s cabin retreat in the Southern Rockies. Here she meets a neighbour, Theo, and they embark on an ill-fated affair.
There are flashbacks to Sarah’s childhood in Cornwall. The isolation of the cabin unsettles her equilibrium. Theo falls in love with this young woman whose pressure cooked emotions demand release.
Despite the foreboding atmosphere the writing remains lyrical, the imagery painting both sensation and location. Sarah is delicate and fierce, owning her needs without apology, a female willing to reject societal expectation.
The final quarter of the book lost some of the coherancy which had held together preceding chapters. Nevertheless, the quality of the prose ensured engagement was retained. The denouement was unexpected yet once read could be regarded as inevitable. Disquieting but pure pleasure to read.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Freight Books.
Flesh of the Peach, by Helen McClory, is a story of grief, selfishness, and the lasting damage caused by damaged people. The protagonist is Sarah Browne, a twenty-seven year old aspiring artist who, when the story opens, has been rejected by her married lover on the day she discovers her estranged mother has finally died. Raised in a chaotic household of women, where attention was rare and often caustic, she escaped to London as a teenager and then on to New York, a city she now chooses to leave.
Sarah decides to use her newly acquired inheritance to start again, to move to a cabin in New Mexico where she hopes to find the space to consider what she can now be. She takes with her just a few possessions, including a new yellow sundress, but also decades of emotional baggage that she has worked to suppress.
“She placed the newly purchased dress so that it lay across the bed in a pool like sunshine. […] She was going to dress from now on for a beautiful life. Keep saying those words to yourself. It sounds naive but that is one way to choose to exist. As a polished stone skipped across the harshness of things.”
Sarah’s wish is that she be the best possible version of herself, which is the most that any can aspire to be.
There follows a roadtrip in a Greyhound bus, a stay in a soulless motel, and then a drive to her late mother’s cabin retreat in the Southern Rockies. Here she meets a neighbour, Theo, and they embark on an ill-fated affair.
There are flashbacks to Sarah’s childhood in Cornwall. The isolation of the cabin unsettles her equilibrium. Theo falls in love with this young woman whose pressure cooked emotions demand release.
Despite the foreboding atmosphere the writing remains lyrical, the imagery painting both sensation and location. Sarah is delicate and fierce, owning her needs without apology, a female willing to reject societal expectation.
The final quarter of the book lost some of the coherancy which had held together preceding chapters. Nevertheless, the quality of the prose ensured engagement was retained. The denouement was unexpected yet once read could be regarded as inevitable. Disquieting but pure pleasure to read.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Freight Books.
More...