CANR
WORK TITLE: The Pre-War House and Other Stories
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1971
WEBSITE: http://www.alison-moore.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: English
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1971, in Manchester, England; married Dan; children: Arthur.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of Nottingham, England, honorary lecturer. Affiliated with Nottingham Writers Studio, England.
AWARDS:Shortlist, Man Booker Prize, 2012, McKitterick Prize, and Book of the Year, London Observer, all for The Lighthouse; Book of the Year, London Observer, for He Wants.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror. Contributor of stories to BBC Radio.
SIDELIGHTS
Alison Moore is a British writer. She has released novels and short stories. Moore has also served as an honorary lecturer at the University of Nottingham, England.
Moore’s first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize. The book’s protagonist is Futh, whose marriage is ending. Ruth travels to Germany to partake in some therapeutic walking and to remove himself from his difficult relationship. As he walks, he thinks about his wife, Angela, and his mother, of the same name, who disappears. Futh believes his father may have propositioned his wife and that Angela may have slept with his step-brother.
“An intriguing twist toward the end brings the two narratives together in this satisfying, mysterious novel,” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked: “Complex and thrilling, this meditation on the past is a gripping story of betrayal and its lingering effects.” An Internet Bookwatch writer described the book as “a unique, compelling, deftly crafted novel.” Jenn Ashworth, critic in the London Guardian, suggested: “The Lighthouse is a spare, slim novel that explores grief and loss. … The brutal ending continues to shock after several re-readings.”
The Pre-War House and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by Moore. Characters in the book include an aging beauty, a frustrated wife, and a child whose parents are splitting up because of infidelity.
A Kirkus Reviews critic noted that the stories in the collection produce “a subdued and beautiful feeling of yearning that leaves the reader ruminating long after the final page.” The same critic described the book as “a masterful collection.” Dinah Birch, reviewer on the London Guardian website, described the book as “just as uncompromising and unsettling as The Lighthouse.” Birch continued: “Moore’s strength lies in the measured control of her work: never discursive, she enacts her characters’ uneasiness precisely, showing us what they see, and what they feel.” Birch also stated: “The ruthless manipulation of detail and design is essential to Moore’s achievement, but it runs the risk of becoming oppressively formulaic, or even claustrophobic.” However, Birch concluded: “Moore’s distinctive voice commands exceptional power, and she has now reached a point where success should give her the confidence to explore different kinds of fictional freedom.” A writer on the Lit Nerd website asserted: “Every single story is brilliantly written and structured and has [an] original storyline.” The same writer added: “It is emotive, it is chilling, it is a gem to read.”
An aging teacher and widower named Lewis Sullivan is the main character in Moore’s 2014 novel, He Wants. As he grows older, he begins questioning the trajectory his life has taken. He recalls his relationship with his late wife, Edie, and his father, Lawrence, who each disappointed him in different ways.
Anita Sethi, critic on the London Observer website, commented: “Desires teem throughout the pages of this slim yet forceful second novel from the Man Booker prize-shortlisted author of The Lighthouse. Some are easy to fulfil yet others remain forever unattainable for the characters, and it is these that create the powerful poignancy.” “Moore cleverly shows how the growing impersonality of the modern era manufactures the sense of alienation and fatally interacts with the individual’s faltering belief in reality,” suggested Rachel Cusk on the London Guardian Online. Writing on the Litro website, Clare Fisher asserted: “Moore marries the meticulous plotting of the thriller with a distinctive pared-down style; Moore trusts the reader to find their own answers to the existential questions which emerge from her work’s silences as elegantly as they do its words.” Heather Birrell, reviewer on the Toronto Star Online, remarked: “The quietness of this novel will make you prick up your ears; this is storytelling that invites and sustains careful attention.” Birrell added: “This longing to be known and loved suffuses Lewis’s story with an elusive sadness and … the novel’s conclusion both satisfies and bewilders.”
In Death and the Seaside, Bonnie is a young aspiring writing, who befriends Sylvia, the owner of the flat she has just begun renting. Sylvia takes Bonnie to her creepy seaside home, insisting that Bonnie should finish one of her short stories there.
Sarah Crown, contributor to the London Guardian Online, commented: “Death and the Seaside is a challenging book. Dense, complex, thought-provoking, it manages to be at once a fairytale and a philosophical treatise, high-octane thriller and literary interrogation. Like the dreams that haunt Bonnie’s night-times, it holds its secrets close, and repays careful rereading. The end of the novel, abrupt and death-haunted, feels as neat and tight as a key in a lock, and sheds light on the mysteries that have gone before.” “Moore is cunning with literary conceits and motifs but the story remains absorbing and sharp,” asserted Ruth McKee on the Irish Times Online. A writer on the Annethology website suggested: “The female focus affords the opportunity to explore exploitation within friendship and, somewhat like Pat Barker in Regeneration, drip feed satisfying droplets of feminism, such as a rare moment of self-assertion from Bonnie as she reflects on her degree.” The same writer concluded: “Although a short novel at under 200 pages, it’s packed with nuance, good sense and humour.” Similarly, Jackie Law, reviewer on the Neverimitate website, remarked: “At 160 pages this is not a long read. For the size of the work it packs a mighty, subversive punch.”
Set in the Scottish Borders, Missing tells the story of a recently-single middle-aged woman named Jesse. Her loneliness is eased when she begins dating a local man named Robert, whom she meets at a bus stop.
Reviewing the volume on the Spectator Online, Hamish Robinson noted: “Pain and grief seem to lurk behind every object, every reflection, but the elements of the plot assemble slowly. The thickening agent is the deft manipulation of motifs and themes.” “In under 200 pages Moore skilfully delivers a twisty, suspenseful story in the manner of a defeatist thriller, full of the reckoning and regret of middle age,” asserted Catherine Taylor on the New Statesman website. Taylor also described the book as a “cleverly wrought novel of absences.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Internet Bookwatch, August, 2017, review of The Lighthouse.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2017, review of The Lighthouse; June 1, 2018, review of The Pre-War House and Other Stories.
London Guardian Online, August 25, 2012, Jenn Ashworth, review of The Lighthouse, p. 13.
Publishers Weekly, June 19, 2017, review of The Lighthouse, p. 88.
ONLINE
Alison Moore website, http://www.alison-moore.com/ (August 16, 2018).
Annethology, https://annegoodwin.weebly.com/ (August 13, 2016), review of Death and the Seaside.
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (November 5, 2016), Ruth McKee, review of Death and the Seaside.
Lit Nerd, http://www.litnerd.co.uk/ (July 16, 2013), review of The Pre-War House and Other Stories.
Litro, https://www.litro.co.uk/ (August 18, 2014), Clare Fisher, review of He Wants.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (May 17, 2013), Dinah Birch, review of The Pre-War House and Other Stories; (July 31, 2014), Rachel Cusk, review of He Wants; (August 20, 2016), Sarah Crown, review of Death and the Seaside; (June 13, 2018), Anna Aslanyan, review of Missing.
London Observer Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (August 10, 2014), Anita Sethi, review of He Wants.
Neverimitate, https://neverimitate.wordpress.com/ (May 12, 2016), Jackie Law, review of Death and the Seaside.
New Statesman Online, https://www.newstatesman.com/ (June 6, 2018), Catherine Taylor, review of Missing.
Spectator Online, https://www.spectator.co.uk/ (June 2, 2018), Hamish Robinson, review of Missing.
Toronto Star Online, https://www.thestar.com/ (March 27, 2016), Heather Birrell, review of He Wants.
Alison Moore
(b.1971)
Alison's stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies including Best British Short Stories.
Born in Manchester in 1971, she lives near Nottingham with her husband Dan and son Arthur and is a member of Nottingham Writers Studio.
New Books
May 2018
(paperback)
Missing
November 2018
(paperback)
Sunny and the Ghosts
Novels
The Lighthouse (2012)
He Wants (2014)
Death and the Seaside (2016)
Missing (2018)
Sunny and the Ghosts (2018)
Collections
The Pre-War House and Other Stories (2013)
Awards
The Man Booker Prize Best Novel nominee (2012) : The Lighthouse
Alison Moore
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This article is about the writer. For the voice actress, see Allison Moore. For the musician, see Allison Moorer.
Alison Moore (born 1971) is an English writer. Born in Manchester, she lives in Leicestershire.
Work[edit]
Moore's 2012 début novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize.[1] In reaction to the announcement, Moore commented: "Reaching the shortlist is ridiculously exciting. I keep feeling like I ought to stop daydreaming and get on with something, but it's all real."[2] Chair of the Booker jury, Sir Peter Stothard, described the jury's decision in the following words: "The judges admired The Lighthouse's bleak inner landscape, a temperature control set low and an impressively assured control."[3] Before The Lighthouse, Moore had written and published several short stories, collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories.[4] Her second novel, He Wants, was published in 2014. Both The Lighthouse and He Wants were Observer Books of the Year.[5][6]
Alison Moore's short fiction has been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror anthologies, broadcast on BBC Radio and collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories. Her first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards, winning the McKitterick Prize. Both The Lighthouse and her second novel, He Wants, were Observer Books of the Year. Her latest novel is Missing, and her first book for children, Sunny and the Ghosts, will be published in November.
Born in Manchester in 1971, Alison lives in a village on the Leicestershire-Nottinghamshire border with her husband and son and is an honorary lecturer in the School of English at the University of Nottingham.
Alison Moore’s first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards (New Writer of the Year), winning the McKitterick Prize. Both The Lighthouse and her second novel, He Wants, were Observer Books of the Year. Her short fiction has been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror anthologies, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra and collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories. Born in Manchester in 1971, she lives near Nottingham with her husband Dan and son Arthur.
QUOTED: "a subdued and beautiful feeling of yearning that leaves the reader ruminating long after the final page."
"a masterful collection."
Moore, Alison: THE PRE-WAR HOUSE AND OTHER STORIES
Kirkus Reviews. (June 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Moore, Alison THE PRE-WAR HOUSE AND OTHER STORIES Biblioasis (Adult Fiction) $14.95 7, 3 ISBN: 978-1-77196-215-5
An understated series of stories by Moore--whose first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize--captures facets of loss and obligation.
Set in empty homes, isolated fortresses, and seaside cottages, these stories use physical spaces as echo chambers of memory--of what once was or what might have been. In and out of them, women and girls (plus two male protagonists) skirt life's darkest forces, particularly the weight of birth, death, and infidelity. In "Seclusion," Maureen, once a desired young woman, contends with onslaughts of forgetfulness and fearful isolation--until she attempts to seize control by stealing a reminder of her past in her daughter's old bedroom. "Late" finds a middle-aged woman queasily rushing to work after a cocktail-fueled evening with her deadbeat husband, taking stock of her marriage before returning that evening to a house that has been irrevocably changed. "Humming and Pinging" poignantly explores the sadness of infidelity from a child's perspective, while the meditative title story, which features a woman packing up her family home, shows that beneath the well-manicured lawns and tar soap-scented judgments of her childhood, more complicated secrets lurk. There's a sense of unmet expectations inherent in these stories--a version of the imagined past or present that juts up against reality, creating a quiet sense of sadness that dogs these characters. As they navigate their lives, Moore slowly unearths their essential fears, regrets, and unmet desires, producing a subdued and beautiful feeling of yearning that leaves the reader ruminating long after the final page.
A masterful collection.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Moore, Alison: THE PRE-WAR HOUSE AND OTHER STORIES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723376/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=993cf8a2. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723376
QUOTED: "An intriguing twist toward the end brings the two narratives together in this satisfying, mysterious novel."
The Lighthouse
Publishers Weekly. 264.25 (June 19, 2017): p88.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Lighthouse
Alison Moore. Biblioasis (Consortium, U.S. dist.; UTR Canadian dist.), $14.95 trade paper (205p) ISBN 978-1-77196-145-5
American readers will enjoy Moore's (He Wants) assured debut novel, previously published in the U.K. and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Futh, a man only ever referred to by his surname, has just broken up with his wife and has traveled to Germany, his father's homeland, for a walking holiday. He has brought with him a little silver lighthouse--a special perfume container that belonged to his mother, who abandoned Futh when he was young. The narrative moves between the present and the past and between Futh and Ester, the woman who runs the first hotel he stays at in Germany and whose story has some odd parallels with Futh's own. Moore's deceptively simple style perfectly suits this tale of memory, sadness, and self-doubt. The details and the voice combine to create an unnerving, creepy story of a rather pitiful man. Futh is neurotic, socially awkward, and would be easy to mock--yet Moore makes him a very sympathetic character, with the humiliations he endures at the hands of those he loves inspiring sympathy in the reader. An intriguing twist toward the end brings the two narratives together in this satisfying, mysterious novel. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Lighthouse." Publishers Weekly, 19 June 2017, p. 88. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496643852/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=523fdf30. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496643852
QUOTED: "Complex and thrilling, this meditation on the past is a gripping story of betrayal and its lingering effects."
Moore, Alison: THE LIGHTHOUSE
Kirkus Reviews. (June 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Moore, Alison THE LIGHTHOUSE Biblioasis (Adult Fiction) $14.95 7, 10 ISBN: 978-1-77196-145-5
An Englishman in the throes of an existential crisis travels to Germany in hopes of sorting out his life, but he finds himself inadvertently in the middle of a volatile marriage of two hotel owners.After his wife unexpectedly leaves him, Futh decides to travel to his father's home village in Germany to hike and clear his head. On his first night in country, he stays at a small hotel owned by Ester and Bernard, a couple trapped in a cycle of deceit, abuse, and jealousy. Bernard mistakes Ester's taking care of Futh for signs of infidelity, and he develops a grudge before Futh leaves in the morning to continue his trip. As the days pass, Futh's memories of his traumatic boyhood and fraught relationship with his father resurface like little windows into his troubled mind and habits, while Ester and Bernard circle one another in a dangerous game of cat and mouse. But when Futh returns to the hotel, he loses a beloved memento of his mother's and, in his attempts to get it back, is pulled deeper into the twisted marriage between Bernard and Ester. Starkly written and suspenseful, this novel--shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and published in the U.S. for the first time--is a slow burn of jealousy, anger, and anxiety that reads like a drama peeked at through a crack in a door. Moore's (Death and the Seaside, 2016, etc.) prose is sharp and often sparse, while her characters are loathsome and sympathetic by turns. Complex and thrilling, this meditation on the past is a gripping story of betrayal and its lingering effects.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Moore, Alison: THE LIGHTHOUSE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427923/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fe7db5f4. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495427923
QUOTED: "a unique, compelling, deftly crafted novel."
The Lighthouse
Internet Bookwatch. (Aug. 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
The Lighthouse
Alison Moore
Biblioasis
1520 Wyandotte Street East, Windsor, ON N9A 3L2, Canada
www.biblioasis.com
9781771961455, $14.95, PB, 192pp, www.amazon.com
The "The Lighthouse" is the debut novel of author Alison Moore and is the story of Futh, a middle-aged, recently separated man who is heading to Germany for a restorative walking holiday. During his circular walk along the Rhine, Futh contemplates the formative moments of his childhood. At the end of the week, Futh returns to what he sees as the sanctuary of his hotel, unaware of the events which have been unfolding there in his absence. A unique, compelling, deftly crafted novel that reveals author Alison Moore's genuine flair for creating memorable characters and an unpredictable and consistently engaging storyline, "The Lighthouse" is unreservedly recommended for community library Contemporary General Fiction collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists that "The Lighthouse" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $9.99).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Lighthouse." Internet Bookwatch, Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504053904/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e5e7b9ec. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504053904
QUOTED: "The Lighthouse is a spare, slim novel that explores grief and loss. ... The brutal ending continues to shock after several re-readings."
Review: FICTION: Ever increasing circles: Jenn Ashworth admires an unsettling and spare debut: The Lighthouse by Alison Moore 182pp, Salt, pounds 8.99
The Guardian (London, England). (Aug. 25, 2012): Arts and Entertainment: p13.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Full Text:
Byline: Jenn Ashworth
The first pages of The Lighthouse, a debut novel included on the Booker longlist, introduce the reader to its strange structure. Futh, standing on the deck of a ferry that carries him away from an unravelling marriage to a walking holiday along the Rhine, remembers a previous trip on a ferry with his father, both of them bruised and angry after the sudden departure of Futh's mother.
This scene has its own little Russian doll tucked inside it: Futh's father, in the dimness of a ferry cinema, tells him the story of another cinema visit where he arrived with one woman and left with another - Angela, the woman who would become his mother. Angela is also the name of Futh's estranged wife. "I'm not your mother," she'll tell him, as their marriage crumbles.
The plot is simple yet impossible to summarise. Futh reflects on early trips he took with his parents and his estranged wife. We learn about the patched-together family his father builds with Gloria, the woman next door, and her son Kenny, in the aftermath of Futh's mother's disappearance. The insistence on substitution - on the interchangeability of characters and plot-lines, on repetition and circularity - is deliciously unsettling. Objects come and go - Venus fly traps, perfume bottles, violets. The effect is frightening and dreamlike.
This technique leaves plot threads dangling - did Futh's father make a sexual approach to his son's wife, Angela? Did Angela have an indiscretion with Kenny, Futh's (almost) stepbrother? As we wonder, we start to experience a little of Futh's misery and paranoia. Did his mother really just leave them, or is her disappearance connected to something more sinister? Futh's loop of a walk seems to speak the novel's main truth: we go in circles, repeating the past and helplessly re-experiencing our earliest hurts.
Yet for all this backwards movement, which might be the kiss of death to a novel's pace, The Lighthouse is a page-turner. Futh starts his week by staying overnight at Ester and Bernard's bed and breakfast - the white-painted HellHaus, or Lighthouse (a little nod to DM Thomas's The White Hotel, perhaps - a novel that shares The Lighthouse's obsession with the unheimlich). Ester deliberately riles Bernard because he pays attention to her only when other men do - no matter that the attention often leaves her bruised and bleeding. During his stay, Futh manages to offend Bernard so grievously that for the rest of the novel, as his long walk takes him in a circle back to HellHaus, our sense of inevitable disaster becomes almost unbearable; it is accentuated by the fact that Futh himself is unaware of his gaffe and does not share our growing dread.
Occasionally, the scaffolding that supports The Lighthouse's construction is rather shaky. There's a piece of backstory about Ester and Bernard's history that, in its treatment of brothers and infidelity, echoes and emphasises the delicately handled sexual competition between Futh and Kenny a touch too neatly. Similarly, Futh's job as a manufacturer of artificial scents resonates too heavily with Ester's interest in the making of perfumes. The artifice shows, but only for a moment before we're immersed in a chilly, heart-wrenching story that seems to say that, for all our obsessions with old wounds and childhood hurts, the thing that damages us most of all is the thing of which we are unaware.
The Lighthouse is a spare, slim novel that explores grief and loss, the patterns in the way we are hurt and hurt others, and the childlike helplessness we feel as we suffer rejection and abandonment. It explores the central question about leaving and being left: even when it feels inevitable, why does it hurt so much, and why is this particular kind of numbness so repellent to others? The brutal ending continues to shock after several re-readings.
Jenn Ashworth's Cold Light is published by Sceptre. To order The Lighthouse for pounds 6.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
Jenn Ashworth
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Review: FICTION: Ever increasing circles: Jenn Ashworth admires an unsettling and spare debut: The Lighthouse by Alison Moore 182pp, Salt, pounds 8.99." Guardian [London, England], 25 Aug. 2012, p. 13. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A300707259/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=286585f6. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A300707259
QUOTED: "Pain and grief seem to lurk behind every object, every reflection, but the elements of the plot assemble slowly. The thickening agent is the deft manipulation of motifs and themes."
Books
Missing, by Alison Moore reviewed
Pain and grief seem to lurk behind every object in Moore’s haunting novel, set in the Scottish Borders
Hamish Robinson
Hamish Robinson
2 June 2018
9:00 AM
Missing
Alison Moore
Salt, pp.176, £9.99
Whereas in an unabashed thriller, in the TV series The Missing, for example, the object of the exercise is well understood — a child is lost — and the viewer, with certain advantages, rides through the unfolding events saddled up on the back of a questing protagonist, in Alison Moore’s Missing, as in her Booker-shortlisted first novel The Lighthouse, the reader is placed in a very different position.
Jesse Noon, a divorced mother approaching 50, is followed round her house in Hawick in the Scottish Borders by a cat and a dog, and the reader follows too. Something is wrong — several things. One morning less than a year earlier, her partner Will, a train driver, upped and left, leaving a message written on a steamed-up mirror. He had hoped for a child that ‘never appeared’.
By default, Jesse has acquired his dog. She is also estranged from her son, Paul, the product of a brief early marriage. She has just returned early from a conference on literary translation, her trade, in London. Deafened and disorientated by a blocked ear, she could barely participate. Waiting for a bus in Carlisle, she meets Robert, who also lives in Hawick, and a tentative relationship develops over encounters in Morrisons and shared meals.
She remembers things — or doesn’t: in a separate, weighted strand of the narrative headed ‘1985’, we catch glimpses of the teenage Jesse travelling to France with her sister Gail and her husband, as baby-sitter to her niece Eleanor; and of her friendship with Amy, from whom she poached the man who briefly became her husband. She had bought the house in Hawick believing it to have once belonged to her great-great-grandmother. She thinks it might be haunted. She reads one biography of D.H. Lawrence after another. Pain and grief seem to lurk behind every object, every reflection, but the elements of the plot assemble slowly. The thickening agent is the deft manipulation of motifs and themes.
In The Lighthouse, the reader is drip-fed information about two very different lives, both charged with unhappiness, that intersect explosively in a hotel in Germany. So compelling is the build-up, that the climax is silent — as if the explosion had beaten the reader to the punch. The same highly engineered, drip-feed technique is applied in Missing, but the crisis never comes. What does come is more drift-like, rhythmical and mysterious: change.
QUOTED: "In under 200 pages Moore skilfully delivers a twisty, suspenseful story in the manner of a defeatist thriller, full of the reckoning and regret of middle age."
"cleverly wrought novel of absences."
Alison Moore’s Missing explores the lasting effects of early trauma
In under 200 pages, Moore skilfully delivers a twisty, suspenseful story that doubles as a study of unspoken grief.
By
Catherine Taylor
David Sandison/Writer Pictures
A strong sense of the unheimlich: Alison Moore
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Alison Moore’s fourth novel features a house with more than its fair share of obligatory creaking floorboards, a spare room that the cat and dog refuse to enter, and an eccentric owner, Jessie Noon, who seems at odds with her environment. A ghost story, perhaps? Yet with Moore, material objects are typically used as metaphors for the troubled inner workings of her characters.
Unusual, somewhat disassociated individuals, relatively mundane landscapes and a strong sense of the unheimlich are this writer’s speciality: in her first, Man Booker-shortlisted novel, The Lighthouse, a man named Futh takes a walking holiday to Germany, where he is plagued by memories of childhood abandonment.
Her second, He Wants, was described by one reviewer as “a sort of Midlands Death in Venice”, in which Lewis, an elderly widower, has a final, poignant stab at articulating long-suppressed desires.
Moore’s third novel, Death and the Seaside, riffed on Schubert’s melancholic string quartet Death and the Maiden to create a Muriel Spark-like metafiction in which an aspiring author, Bonnie Falls, stuck in a dead-end job and bleak seaside town, finds herself writing her way into a parallel life, with unexpectedly sinister results.
The cultural companion in Missing is DHLawrence, a biography of whom Jessie Noon reads nightly in an attempt to ward off her insomnia and distract herself from the strange sounds emanating from the empty spare room in her house. “In what she had read of his work, there was always a sense of being poised between worlds… The characters… were always torn between staying and leaving, torn between this world, this life, and another.”
The characters in Missing are similarly in limbo, half-presences caught in a different time and place. Jessie herself took flight from her home in the Fens to the Midlands following a family tragedy that occurred when she was a teenager. She is now 49, living a life of monotonous but satisfying routine in a small town in the Scottish Borders, her second husband having walked out the year before, his goodbye message written enigmatically in steam on the bathroom mirror. Her son from her first marriage had left as a teenager, and has never contacted her since.
Jessie, a translator of foreign literature, is always searching for the right word or phrase for the book on which she is currently working. Yet she is also a woeful misinterpreter of communication with others; a peculiar mix of diffidence and uninhibitedness. She writes Christmas cards and sends text messages to people who never reply. She quotes ghost stories at length to total strangers. She is tactless to a point beyond clumsiness. She has, in some ways, never grown up.
It slowly becomes clear that, as with Moore’s first novel, Missing is concerned with early trauma and its lasting, frequently emotionally paralysing effects. It switches between the present day and 1985, the year that Jessie turned 18, when her five-year-old niece Eleanor, the daughter of her older sister, disappeared. In flashback Moore builds a beautifully complete picture of a curious, questing child, her closeness to Jessie, and Jessie’s reaction to Eleanor’s vanishing.
The irrationality of unspoken grief underpins the book, from Jessie’s brief Christmas visit to her now elderly parents’ care home – where, in a bizarre scene, they serve her the equivalent of a children’s birthday tea – to the silent, barely controlled rage of her brother-in-law, and Jessie herself, comatose in an incongruous silver dress on Eleanor’s still-preserved bed after drinking too much at a New Year party.
The novel exudes loneliness and a sense of disintegration. The progression of a hairline crack in Jessie’s kitchen window appears especially fatalistic, as does the constant sighing of the autumn leaves outside her spooky spare room.
In under 200 pages Moore skilfully delivers a twisty, suspenseful story in the manner of a defeatist thriller, full of the reckoning and regret of middle age, nowhere more apparent than in Jessie’s brief, rather excruciating relationship with Robert, a local outreach worker.
During one of their elliptical conversations Jessie asks if he knows the Virginia Woolf short story “A Haunted House”: “The ghosts in it are searching the house for something they left there, and what they find they left in the house is love.” Jessie’s apparently casual comment is a heartfelt plea to be taken notice of and accounted for, and wretchedly indicates who, in this cleverly wrought novel of absences, is the most missing.
Missing
Alison Moore
Salt, 192pp, £9.99
Missing by Alison Moore review – loss, loneliness and hope
Tension grows as a literary translator is haunted by her losses in an expert mingling of the tragic and the mundane
Anna Aslanyan
Wed 13 Jun 2018 12.00 BST
Last modified on Mon 18 Jun 2018 16.49 BST
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Realist drama and romance … Alison Moore. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian
“H
ow does it end?” you often ask yourself as you read a book, trying to imagine where the plot is leading you. Alison Moore’s fourth novel, coming six years after her Man Booker-shortlisted debut, The Lighthouse, is one of those books that, once you immerse yourself in them, makes the question irrelevant: it would be like trying to guess how your life might end instead of living it.
The protagonist, Jessie, is in her late 40s. Her life appears uneventful: she lives in Scotland with a cat and a dog, her second husband having recently left her. The novel’s title refers to the losses she has suffered and witnessed; a list so long you can’t help thinking that some of what’s missing must eventually come back. Will Jessie be reunited with her son, who won’t reply to her texts? Will she see her niece again? Will her husband return? However, you soon realise that the narrative has its own rules, so you should let its flow carry you at its own, precisely measured speed.
There are also questions over whether Jessie’s hearing will be restored, and with it, her way with words, “which had become, inside her head, muffled, hazy at the edges … trickier to use”. A literary translator, she feels that “her choice made a difference”, but once a project is finished, it’s as if “all those months of fretting over this word or that word, deliberating over this or that turn of phrase, had been for no one but herself”. Translation, her experience confirms, is a lonely job, like any other art.
As losses accumulate and ghosts multiply, the book begins to resemble a gothic tale
As losses accumulate and ghosts multiply, the book begins to resemble a gothic tale, conflating the tragic and the mundane, betrayal and cooking, loneliness and “newspapers and phones and children and meal deals”. You suspect that some of these leads might be false, but the current of Moore’s prose is stronger than the pull of any potential plot twists. The main narrative is interspersed with flashbacks to 1985 and with anonymous messages, in which someone tells Jessie they are coming home. The interruptions grow longer; the tension increases. And then, without breaking the rhythm, Moore swiftly brings the story to an end, reminding you that life can be a realist drama and a romance, a horror story and an existential novel – often all of these things at once, and more.
Missing by Alison Moore (Salt Publishing, £9.99). To order a copy for £8.49, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
QUOTED: "Desires teem throughout the pages of this slim yet forceful second novel from the Man Booker prize-shortlisted author of The Lighthouse. Some are easy to fulfil yet others remain forever unattainable for the characters, and it is these that create the powerful poignancy."
He Wants review – Alison Moore's visceral second novel
Alison Moore explores desire, dreams and thwarted lives in her slim, poignant second offering
Anita Sethi
@anitasethi
Sun 10 Aug 2014 16.00 BST
First published on Sun 10 Aug 2014 16.00 BST
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Alison Moore: powerful poignancy and elusive emotional yearnings. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian
D
esires teem throughout the pages of this slim yet forceful second novel from the Man Booker prize-shortlisted author of The Lighthouse. Some are easy to fulfil yet others remain forever unattainable for the characters, and it is these that create the powerful poignancy.
What do you want? This small question – with enormous significance – forms the title of the opening chapter and as the narrative unfolds, the characters Sydney, Lewis and Ruth are forced to interrogate their desires.
Hunger overwhelms the ex-prisoner Sydney as the novel opens and he enters a cafe, so ravenous that he finds "his stomach growling like something at the zoo waiting to be thrown some meat". He definitely doesn't want the salad on offer, though, instead an all-you-can-eat buffet.
It is not only animalistic physical desires that Moore depicts but also more elusive emotional and spiritual yearnings. What don't you want? This is also a central question. The widowed Lewis lives in a village in the Midlands, an RE teacher at a secondary school, approaching retirement and pondering the paths not taken. He pines for people who aren't present and is frustrated by what he does have in his life – including the soup his daughter makes each day; his cravings are not only for richer food, though, but for fulfilling friendship, too.
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What do you want that you can't have? One chapter is entitled "He Wants to Fly". Within Lewis stir long buried childhood dreams, including venturing to the moon. His imagination has often surpassed the reality of his life, and Moore movingly mines the aching gap between aspiration and actuality.
Lewis's mundane life is interrupted by the arrival of long estranged old school friend Sydney, which forces him to re-evaluate his life and further awakens suppressed desires. How our past comes back to haunt us is also a pressing theme in Moore's The Lighthouse yet here there is hope for a second chance – if not of flying to the moon then at least of fulfilling more terrestrial wishes.
What stops us achieving what we do want? Moore looks at how fear might prevent us pursuing our passions. Yet she also meticulously captures rare moments when characters are free from desire, and content entirely in the present moment, once appreciating, for example, a "burst of beauty before it expired" – flowers in the garden before they wither. But soon enough in this visceral story, desire stirs again.
To buy He Wants for £7.19 with free UK p&p call 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk
QUOTED: "Moore cleverly shows how the growing impersonality of the modern era manufactures the sense of alienation and fatally interacts with the individual's faltering belief in reality."
He Wants review – Alison Moore's story of danger and desire
A widower feels the pedestrian confines of his life begin to break down in this brave and rigorous novel
Rachel Cusk
Thu 31 Jul 2014 09.00 BST
First published on Thu 31 Jul 2014 09.00 BST
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'Lewis has the disconcerting experience of forgetting what he's read.' Illustration: Clifford Harper/Agraphia.co.uk
F
ollowing her Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse, Alison Moore's artistically pleasing second novel is a sort of Midlands Death in Venice, a story of ageing and thwarted desire in which a man drifts away from his moorings into Dionysian impulses, after a lifetime spent serving the values of the humdrum contemporary community in which he lives.
He Wants evokes a world that is purposefully pedestrian – the Dionysian impulses pertain to halves of shandy and the desire to taste a Swiss liqueur called Goldschläger – but its themes of self-realisation, identity and mortality are grand enough. Moore's protagonist, a widower RE teacher who is approaching retirement, is intimately captured in the midst of a disintegration brought about by the loss of the structures that have thus far formed and maintained his personality: work, marriage and certain relationships that have created or reinforced his sense of existence.
Lewis Sullivan's encroaching sense of blankness and unreality has a distinctly Jungian cast: having lived his life according to a preordained template, he is gradually being engulfed by a crisis of identity that afflicts not only his ability to see the meaning of things but to process information about the world he lives in. Moore cleverly shows how the growing impersonality of the modern era manufactures the sense of alienation and fatally interacts with the individual's faltering belief in reality: in the small town where Sullivan was born and has remained, the gradual replacement of what was specific and human by what is generic and mechanised has been predictably thorough. "Lewis remembers how the [mobile] library tipped very slightly towards you as you entered, when you put your weight on the steps, and how it swayed underfoot while you were browsing … In the town library now, you don't take your books to the lady behind the desk, you put them into an opening in a big black machine that scans them. You can leave without speaking to a soul."
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Lewis's wife was once the town librarian, and while they were courting Lewis became an avid reader of literary classics in which his future spouse showed no interest whatsoever. "As he returned each of these books at the end of the loan period, he attempted to discuss them with her, but each time, Edie, eyeing the Austen, the Eliot, the Woolf, would say, 'I haven't read it. It's not my sort of thing.'" In the absence of intellectual compatibility, he and Edie "talked about food, what they had or had not eaten in their lives. 'I've never had beef wellington,' said Edie. 'I've never had black pudding,' said Lewis." In much the same fatalistic way as he gets married – on the basis of shared frustrations – Lewis drifts into a job as a teacher at the school he himself attended, where his father is also a teacher. "Lewis and his father, each a Mr Sullivan, were often confused in the paperwork."
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Lewis teaches RE, when in fact what he would have liked to have taught is chemistry: his chemistry colleague once showed him an experiment in which jelly babies could be made to scream by being immolated in a burning chemical compound, and when Lewis – finding the chemistry lab left open – tried the experiment himself one day, it went wrong and a child was seriously injured. This relationship between danger and desire is cleverly managed by Moore, and indeed almost every aspect of the novel addresses in its way the question of what people want and of why they are driven toward the frustration of their own impulses, as though in the belief that one is safe only when wanting something that is of no value. Literature, and DH Lawrence in particular, plays a role in this constellating of value and desire: when Lewis's English-teacher father becomes a born-again Christian, his lifelong worship of Lawrence turns to hatred, since he now sees Lawrence as merely a pornographer. Lewis, whose literary tastes once defined him against the woman with whom he was to spend his life, has the disconcerting experience of forgetting what he's read, as though the writing can get no foothold on him: "There are books he's had for decades that he thought he'd never got round to opening, and then when he did finally read them, he remembered, as he neared the end, that he had in fact read this before; or he found his own pencilled notes in the margins, perhaps a hundred pages in."
Where Death in Venice's Aschenbach is undone by the eroticising of freedom and death – Mann's vision of passion being a descent into confusion and degradation – the hero of this brave and rigorous novel ultimately experiences the dissolution of personality as a great letting of light into the self's constricted space. The reappearance of Lewis's boyhood friend Sydney – a ruffian who has spent time in prison and now writes romantic novels under a pseudonym – is a joyous event, in that it has the power to break the cycle of desire and its denial. Sydney does what he wants and gets into trouble for it: this, Lewis sees, is what freedom is.
• Rachel Cusk's Outline will be published by Faber in September. To order He Wants for £7.19 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.
QUOTED: "Death and the Seaside is a challenging book. Dense, complex, thought-provoking, it manages to be at once a fairytale and a philosophical treatise, high-octane thriller and literary interrogation. Like the dreams that haunt Bonnie’s night-times, it holds its secrets close, and repays careful rereading. The end of the novel, abrupt and death-haunted, feels as neat and tight as a key in a lock, and sheds light on the mysteries that have gone before."
Death and the Seaside by Alison Moore review – an ominous, multilayered thriller
Meditations on mortality are deftly transposed to a banal English holiday resort in a strikingly ambitious novel that never gives itself airs
Sarah Crown
Sat 20 Aug 2016 07.30 BST
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 12.54 GMT
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The English seaside resort … an antidote to high art. Photograph: Alamy
F
ranz Schubert composed his String Quartet No 14 in D minor – better known as Death and the Maiden – in 1824, following a bout of illness that had left him weak, wretched and convinced that he was dying. In the event, he survived four years more; but in 1828, aged just 31, he died of the same illness (syphilis, most likely) that had laid him low. He was afforded what few are given: a comprehension of mortality and the ability to communicate his conclusions. Nearly two centuries later, Death and the Maiden stands as his act of personal reckoning: a prodigious testament to the agony of life’s transience.
It is typical of Alison Moore’s particular talent that she should look to such a towering work of art and, with one deft tweak, banalise it; take it down a peg or 10. The seaside, with its perky, mid 20th-century connotations of promenades and ice creams, deck chairs, donkey rides and end-of-pier shows, is as effective an antidote to high art as it’s possible to conjure. The substitution in the title sets the tone for an arch, allusive novel that anchors its complex investigations of consciousness, narrative, reality and – yes – death, with prosaic descriptions of rented flats and Chinese restaurants, charity shops and Choose Your Own Adventure books. Death and the Seaside is every bit as searching as Schubert’s quartet, but asks its questions in the context of the modern world, in all its grubby triviality. Nothing is overblown or overstated here; the novel is strikingly ambitious, but the author never gives herself airs.
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Moore’s debut, The Lighthouse, won her a place on the 2012 Man Booker shortlist. Death and the Seaside, her third novel, shares a number of aspects with her first, both in terms of structure and texture (the bleak, unheimlich atmosphere of holiday resorts is explored in both), but if anything, it reaches further and unsettles more deeply. The maiden in question here is Bonnie Falls. Nearing 30, with an abandoned English literature degree behind her, no boyfriend and no friends to speak of, she has finally – at her parents’ insistence – moved out of the family home. Her new abode is a shabby ground-floor conversion, where a locked door in the bedroom leads to the other half of the house, and an understairs cupboard is filled with the evocative cast-offs of former inhabitants: “a cardboard box filled with dusty baby blankets; a cool box; a camping stove … a case of LPs with nothing to play them on”. Mornings and evenings, Bonnie works two cleaning jobs to cover her rent. In the afternoons, she sits in her concreted backyard and writes stories, all of which, it soon becomes clear, are echoes or iterations of her own life.
Among many other things, Death and the Seaside is a novel about novels, a story about stories, a book-length critique of the role of reader and writer. One after effect of Bonnie’s degree is a lingering tendency to “see the real world in terms of narrative” with “stories and symbolism” everywhere. Reading the book, I soon shared her tendency; the more I read, the more every object and incident – from names to seashells to slogans on T-shirts – appeared freighted with ominous significance.
Complex and thought-provoking, the book manages to be at once a fairytale and a philosophical treatise
Into this febrile atmosphere steps Sylvia Slythe, Bonnie’s landlady (the word itself is resonant; another nod to those mid 20th-century seaside resorts). Sylvia turns up on Bonnie’s doorstep one morning: a tall and elegant woman whose “big bright eyes made Bonnie feel like Little Red Riding Hood being looked at by the wolf”. She takes an interest – one that slides from incongruous to overbearing to borderline-obsessive – in Bonnie’s life. After recognising Bonnie’s loneliness and vulnerability, and manipulating both to gain her trust, Sylvia reads the story Bonnie is working on – the tale of an aimless woman with a dead-end job – and points out the similarities between the writer’s life and that of her protagonist. The story is set in a fictional south-coast town that Bonnie matter-of-factly calls Seatown; when Sylvia discovers a real-life Seaton in Devon, she persuades Bonnie to visit it with her. Reality and fiction draw ever more tightly together, and the stage is set for a showdown.
Death and the Seaside is a challenging book. Dense, complex, thought-provoking, it manages to be at once a fairytale and a philosophical treatise, high-octane thriller and literary interrogation. Like the dreams that haunt Bonnie’s night-times, it holds its secrets close, and repays careful rereading. The end of the novel, abrupt and death-haunted, feels as neat and tight as a key in a lock, and sheds light on the mysteries that have gone before. Schubert would be proud.
• To order Death and the Seaside for £7.37 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
QUOTED: "Moore is cunning with literary conceits and motifs but the story remains absorbing and sharp."
Death and the Seaside by Alison Moore
Browser review
Ruth McKee
Sat, Nov 5, 2016, 00:00
First published:
Sat, Nov 5, 2016, 00:00
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Book Title:
Death and the Seaside
ISBN-13:
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Bonnie has never finished anything and, at nearly 30, her life has been a litany of failure and ineptitude. Moving out of her parents’ house into a flat, she forms an unusual friendship with her landlady, Sylvia, who takes an interest in one of her half-written stories. Sylvia urges Bonnie to seek an ending to her story, taking her to an unsettling house by the sea; here, fact and fiction blur, and a steady thrum of suspense takes the book to its inexorable climax. Alison Moore’s debut novel The Lighthouse was shortlisted for The Man Booker, and Death and the Seaside has the same limpid prose with an ecstasy of detail. Metaphor unwraps metaphor in this Russian doll narrative, as Bonnie’s short story mirrors her own (patently fictional) world: here, Moore raises philosophical and psychological questions about suspension of disbelief and free will. Moore is cunning with literary conceits and motifs but the story remains absorbing and sharp. “A hidden world beneath the manifest one,” this short, elegant novel is a glimpse into the subconscious – like a lucid dream.
QUOTED: "The female focus affords the opportunity to explore exploitation within friendship and, somewhat like Pat Barker in Regeneration, drip feed satisfying droplets of feminism, such as a rare moment of self-assertion from Bonnie as she reflects on her degree."
"Although a short novel at under 200 pages, it’s packed with nuance, good sense and humour."
Death and the Seaside by Alison Moore
13/8/2016
6 Comments
In her early twenties, after a gap year that turned into three, all spent under her parents’ roof, her mother had insisted that she go away to university, if she could still find one that would take her. And so she had gone to university, although it was not, as her father had pointed out, a proper university; it was not a good university. She majored in English, because it had always been her best subject and because she had managed to get a B at A level. It was also her native language.
Approaching thirty, and having abandoned her degree, Bonnie Falls moves into a ground floor flat in her home town, subsisting through a couple of cleaning jobs, one at an amusement arcade and the other at a pharmaceutical research and development laboratory. Her landlady, Sylvia Slythe, an older woman, who wears a skirt suit with “a bunch of keys, which made her look a bit like a jailer, but more ladylike” (p27), befriends her, encouraging Bonnie to finish the short story she’s writing in which a young woman moves to the seaside. When Bonnie is unsure of the ending, Sylvia suggests they go away on holiday together, to the Dorset town in which the story is set, where she is sure to find inspiration.
Alison Moore specialises in deceptively simple stories, tightly written and comically dark, with a highly intelligent and psychologically sophisticated undertow. Her fiction explores the heroism and pathos of unheroic lives, of characters lacking in motivation, and exposes the strangeness behind the ordinary, the magic of the mundane. (When Sylvia suggests the holiday, Bonnie’s ambition is to stay at an identikit Ibis, or a Comfort Inn.) Her two previous novels, Man Booker shortlisted The Lighthouse and He Wants, focused primarily, but not exclusively, on the lives of men, so it was interesting to see where she’d go with a story about the friendship between two women.
The female focus affords the opportunity to explore exploitation within friendship and, somewhat like Pat Barker in Regeneration, drip feed satisfying droplets of feminism, such as a rare moment of self-assertion from Bonnie as she reflects on her degree (p11):
In her first term, in An Introduction to English Literature, she heard about the death of the Author, and at first she wondered who they meant, and then she realised that it was all of them, all the authors, and Bonnie thought fleetingly of the dodo. And what was more, asserted Barthes, the Author enters into his own death, or her own death, thought Bonnie, who had just started writing herself.
But it would be a mistake to read Death and the Seaside as primarily about friendship, or even particularly about women. For a little while, although enjoying it immensely, I struggled to articulate to myself what it was about. The text is replete with imagery, as Alison Moore’s fiction tends to be, and I trusted that these early references to death, fear, failure and falling would add up to something special. Indeed it does but, while the evidence suggests that spoilers don’t spoil, if you want to discover how for yourself, you can jump ahead to the photos.
I was primed for the psychology, through both my own professional background and a prepublication conversation with the author when I organised a fringe event at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference at Nottingham City of Literature. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning is neatly foreshadowed through Bonnie’s cleaning job (p19):
She wiped the backlit buttons that said things like ‘PRESS’, ’PUSH’, ‘PUSH!’, ‘HOLD’ and ‘GO’, buffing away the build-up fingerprints made by the punters’ fingertips pecking and pecking at the buttons, waiting for the payout.
It turns out that Sylvia is the character with the background in psychology, proving rather overzealous in her attempts to emulate the big names in experimental social psychology (p92):
It was around that time that I had my first run-in with the university, receiving my first warning. In my defence, I cited Milgram, and Watson, and others who had not been hampered by impossible-to-know long-term effects on the subject. All sorts of things which used to be allowed in experimental psychology are unfortunately no longer permitted, formally.
Of course, I can’t say where her passion takes her, but I saw similarities with Stella in my short story "The Experiment Requires".
Like My Name Is Lucy Barton, Death and the Seaside is also a novel about the creative writing and the creative writing industry. I’m sure many writers could identify with Bonnie, waiting for Sylvia to read her story, feeling “a bit like lying down while a doctor inspected her soft insides and she waited for it to hurt.” (p66) Earlier, she struggles to make sense of the easily-recognisable advice for emerging writers (p34):
‘Write the moment you wake up, when you’re in hypnagogic state and can access your subconscious.’ What Bonnie wrote sitting up in bed in the morning, what she netted from her subconscious, always seemed like so much hogwash. Or she made notes as she was falling asleep, and then, when she looked at them again days or weeks or months later, could not understand what on earth it all meant.
While Bonnie is sceptical of relating to fictional characters like real people, the reader is already embroiled in the conceit as the first character we encounter on the page turns out to be the protagonist of Bonnie’s short story.
How could I not love a novel about reading and writing, about the boundary between fact and fiction, and about maverick psychology? Overall, however it’s a novel about semiotics, and the sometimes subliminal messages of symbols is the glue holding it all together. In Bonnie’s story, Susan is puzzled by a piece of paper pushed under the door of her room. Bonnie’s consciousness is assaulted by adverts and graffiti as she goes about her day. Her parents have raised her as if in an experiment on the impact of self-fulfilling prophecies of failure, but it is left to Sylvia to take this to the limit.
I haven’t found this an easy review to write because, although a short novel at under 200 pages, it’s packed with nuance, good sense and humour (my first laugh-out-loud moment came sixteen lines in, and was about curtains), and I want to represent it all. But I can’t, so I’ll stop, and suggest you read it. Thanks to Salt for my review copy, Alison Moore for signing it and Dan Norcott for the photo.
For other novels about psychology, see my reviews of The Good Children and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
QUOTED: "At 160 pages this is not a long read. For the size of the work it packs a mighty, subversive punch."
Book Review: Death and the Seaside
May
12
by Jackie Law
Death and the Seaside, by Alison Moore, introduces the reader to two women whose lives overlap with devastating results.
Bonnie is approaching her thirtieth birthday but her life has been stunted, much to the frustration of her overbearing parents who regard their daughter as clumsy and incapable. Her mother is constantly impatient with her daughter. Her father systematically puts her down. When they require her to move out of the family home she finds a small flat in a converted house owned by Sylvia, an enigmatic landlady who starts to take an invasive interest in the detail of Bonnie’s life.
Bonnie is an aspiring writer. She is well read and studied English Literature at university. Having dropped out in her final year she did not graduate and now works as a cleaner. She is not the most reliable of employees, struggling to find work and rarely holding down any job for long.
The book opens with a chapter from Bonnie’s latest story. She starts many stories but takes none to completion. It soon becomes clear that her stories are variations and reflections of her own life.
Sylvia mentions early on that she had met Bonnie and her mother when Bonnie was a child but does not elaborate. She offers little of her own background, the burgeoning friendship being one way and controlling. Bonnie has few friends and welcomes attention from whatever source.
Sylvia reads Bonnie’s latest story and encourages her to write more. When Bonnie is unable to tell her the planned ending she suggests that they take a holiday at the setting of the tale, a seaside town Bonnie visited as a child, in order to generate inspiration. Bonnie is excited to be taking a holiday with a friend despite her accommodation requests being ignored.
A sinister undercurrent pervades the tale. On the surface it is is a variation on the theme of a lonely young women who is influenced by a stronger personality. Lurking unsaid is what Sylvia wants from Bonnie and why.
The pleasure of reading is in the detail: Bonnie’s apparent acceptance of her oppressive existence; her relationship with work colleagues, young men, her constantly critical parents. Bonnie appears adrift in the world. Her knowledge of literature and the intelligence this suggests belying the current state of her life.
As Sylvia’s background is revealed the plot takes a sinister turn. The reader is left with much to ponder about influences, known and unknown.
At 160 pages this is not a long read. For the size of the work it packs a mighty, subversive punch.
My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Salt.
QUOTED: "Moore marries the meticulous plotting of the thriller with a distinctive pared-down style; Moore trusts the reader to find their own answers to the existential questions which emerge from her work’s silences as elegantly as they do its words."
Book Review: He Wants by Alison Moore
by Clare Fisher • 18th August 2014 • 1 Comment
Alison Moore’s second novel is a sparse yet sculpted study of what happens when the routines of daily life fall away. We follow Lewis Sullivan in the aftermath of his wife’s death and his retirement from a lifelong career as an R.E teacher as he struggles to make sense of the life he has lived and the unstructured existence he lives now. Holed up in a small house in a small town, he has little appetite for food or anything else, spending most of his days alone, with occasional ‘trips’ to the outside bins. Looking back on key moments in his life forces him to contend with its blank spots and lacunae; he begins to hunger for more.
Moore uses desire as a prism through which to explore Lewis’s life and it’s unravelling. Each chapter focuses on an aspect of his desire, past and present, satiated or otherwise: ‘he does not want soup,’ ‘He Wanted to Live in Australia,’ and ‘He Wants to Feel an Earthquake.’ The taut prose, like these chapter titles and the title of the novel itself, explores the meaning and uncertainty hidden in the banal details of everyday life with understated skill. Here, for example, on why Lewis does not want to eat the soup his daughter, Ruth, brings him every day:
What Lewis really wants is one of Edie’s steak and kidney puddings her chicken curry, her hotpot… He does not want soup but Ruth brings it anyway and Lewis eats it… More often than not he eats it cold, straight from the fridge, minutes before she arrives to take away the empty tub and leave him with another.
The deliberate sparseness the prose and the frequency of short, declarative sentences, create the uneasy sense that these everyday items are both specific surface realities and symbolic of a wider shadow reality. This made the novel as entertaining as it was gripping; Moore walks a tightrope between tragedy-cum-thriller and deadpan comedy and she does not fall.
The key to Lewis’s transformation and burgeoning self-knowledge comes in a reckoning with Sydney, an old school friend who reappears unexpectedly in his life. Sydney is the opposite of Lewis in that he knows what he wants and he goes after it, regardless of the consequences. Moore opens the chapter with his return to their sleepy small town, inhabiting his point of view at such a distance that we believe in him without knowing why he has returned or why he has to hide from certain people. These unanswered questions cast a subtle shadow over the rest of the book, lending Lewis’s hum-drum wanderings an air of menace and mystery. As in her Booker shortlisted debut, The Lighthouse, Moore marries the meticulous plotting of the thriller with a distinctive pared-down style; Moore trusts the reader to find their own answers to the existential questions which emerge from her work’s silences as elegantly as they do its words.
QUOTED: "The quietness of this novel will make you prick up your ears; this is storytelling that invites and sustains careful attention."
"This longing to be known and loved suffuses Lewis’s story with an elusive sadness and ... the novel’s conclusion both satisfies and bewilders."
Booker nominee Alison Moore’s followup invites careful attention: review
By Heather BirrellSpecial to the Star
Sun., March 27, 2016
It is fashionable to call novels in which not much happens in the traditional plot-sense ‘quiet,’ as if obvious cause-consequence links are de facto important, loud. In this sense, Alison Moore’s He Wants (her second novel after the Booker prize shortlisted The Lighthouse) is indeed quiet, concerned less with linear momentum than the sometimes random accretion of moments that make up a life. But the quietness of this novel will make you prick up your ears; this is storytelling that invites and sustains careful attention.
Lewis is a 70-year-old widower and retiree who lives in a village in the British Midlands, very close to where he grew up. He spent his childhood craving travel and adventure, but his adulthood finds him married almost by accident and teaching religious education at the same school where his father taught. Lewis’s daughter Ruth brings him soup every day, which he dutifully eats — cold — right before she’s due back to collect the Tupperware container.
He Wants by Alison Moore, Biblioasis, 188 pages, $19.95. (Biblioasis)
Alison Moore, author of He Wants, Biblioasis. (Brydon / biblioasis)
He Wants by Alison Moore, Biblioasis, 188 pages, $19.95. (Biblioasis)
Alison Moore, author of He Wants, Biblioasis. (Brydon / biblioasis)
We briefly meet the novel’s pseudo antagonist, Sydney, in the novel’s opener. Down on his luck and possibly homeless, he has returned to the place where he grew up, searching for connection. He is a man as extroverted and reckless as Lewis is law-abiding and risk-averse, and part of the intrigue of the novel lies in trying to ascertain how, exactly, these two men are attached. We learn that they were childhood friends, but the basis for their friendship is mysterious. Did Lewis yearn to be closer to Sydney? Or to actually be Sydney? The reader is led, like an amateur analyst, to piece together bits of Lewis’s personal history, in the hope of matching motivation to action.
Despite the novel’s title, rarely does Lewis seem to completely, as they say, ‘know his own mind.’ He knows what he wants to a certain degree (not Ruth’s soup), or in a quotidian sense, or even in the abstract, but he doesn’t articulate these desires to himself in a way that prompts fulfilment. When the barmaid at his regular pub asks “What do you want, love?” he responds with his characteristic polite reticence: “‘Yes, he wants to say to her, yes please.’” This longing to be known and loved suffuses Lewis’s story with an elusive sadness and, perhaps fittingly for a book concerned so much with unmet desires, the novel’s conclusion both satisfies and bewilders.
Heather Birrell is the author, most recently, of the story collection Mad Hope. She is currently living with her family on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.
QUOTED: "just as uncompromising and unsettling as The Lighthouse."
"Moore's strength lies in the measured control of her work: never discursive, she enacts her characters' uneasiness precisely, showing us what they see, and what they feel."
"The ruthless manipulation of detail and design is essential to Moore's achievement, but it runs the risk of becoming oppressively formulaic, or even claustrophobic."
"Moore's distinctive voice commands exceptional power, and she has now reached a point where success should give her the confidence to explore different kinds of fictional freedom."
The Pre-War House and Other Stories by Alison Moore – review
Dinah Birch on a bleak collection that shies away from the comforts of redemption
Dinah Birch
Fri 17 May 2013 14.01 BST
First published on Fri 17 May 2013 14.01 BST
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"Heavy with menace, homes are not places of safety". Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian
A
lison Moore's debut novel and its appearance on last year's Man Booker shortlist brought much attention and admiration. The originality of The Lighthouse is not a matter of formal invention, for Moore employs a familiar technique in tracing the steps of a journey. Futh, a socially inept chemist traumatised by his recent divorce, embarks on a somewhat dispiriting walking holiday in Germany. But the transformational experiences, or at least deepened self‑awareness, that often accompany fictional travellers never come his way. Burdened by his damaged boyhood, Futh is going nowhere. He cannot escape the constraints of a life that has defeated him.
The level of accomplishment on display in this bleak narrative is remarkable. Moore is not, however, a beginner. She has been publishing short stories since 2000, and that apprenticeship shaped her first novel. Now she has published a collection of her stories, and it turns out to be just as uncompromising and unsettling as The Lighthouse.
Moore's writing has no truck with the comforts of imagined redemption. One of the features that makes The Lighthouse exceptional is its steady refusal of consolation for the hapless Futh. Nothing goes well for him. He doesn't manage as much as a decent cup of coffee throughout the entire novel, and the unfolding story of his early life makes it clear that an accumulation of sadness and incompetence has corroded his existence from its beginnings. Failure is not something to be learned from: it simply generates more disappointment, further unhappiness. This pattern is relentlessly repeated throughout The Pre-War House. A "creeping tide" of harm moves through these stories, "flooding in" as they reach their desolate conclusions.
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A pared-down style allows Moore to accentuate the images that expose her characters' vulnerability. No one is safe, but the lives of children are particularly uncertain. "Chewing, I felt a milk tooth shift, and the sickening looseness in my jaw was like subsidence in my mouth." These particularities are occasionally beautiful. A lyrical passage lingers on the colour and fragility of birds' eggs – "a yellowhammer's white and purple-scribbled egg, a skylark's greyish and brown-flecked egg". More often, observations are highlighted as the signs of disturbance: "she notices the dirt and oil on her hands and a stain on her blouse". These glimpses of trouble are neither random nor decorative. Moore's strength lies in the measured control of her work: never discursive, she enacts her characters' uneasiness precisely, showing us what they see, and what they feel.
The opening story, "When the Door Closed, It Was Dark", confronts the reader with an insistent physicality, shadowed with violence. An inexperienced girl works as an au pair, homesick and evidently disliked by her employers. She is looking after a baby whose mother has disappeared, as mothers often do in these stories, for varieties of parental dysfunction lie at the centre of Moore's circles of distress. The language vibrates with foreboding: "She can hardly bear the weight she is carrying, and the rising sun beats down on her … The paintwork was bruise-coloured and blistered." The story ends with a painful jolt, but the shock is not unexpected, nor is it graphically described. The inevitability of disaster is conveyed by oblique suggestion. Moore's taut stories construct, detail by careful detail, the prisons in which her characters will be destroyed. The door closes, the darkness falls.
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In this world, heavy with menace, homes are not places of safety. Moore leads her characters into enclosed domestic spaces in which they are held, willing or not, finding themselves confined rather than protected. The closing door of the opening story echoes throughout the collection, and usually it is firmly locked. Sometimes her bolder figures, like Futh, choose to venture into new places, aspiring to break out of their frustrated lives. Their ineffectual gestures leave them disoriented and defenceless. Over and over again, we leave them just before their fate is confirmed, in whatever horrifying version it may take, the reader's moment of chilled recognition coinciding with the helpless shock of the victim. There are worse things, in Moore's stories, than isolation. "You will know that you are not alone."
The ruthless manipulation of detail and design is essential to Moore's achievement, but it runs the risk of becoming oppressively formulaic, or even claustrophobic. The title story is placed last in the collection, and it exhibits all the stories' persistent characteristics – the house that becomes a place of entrapment, the vanishing mother, the eruption of violence, lost lives numbed with drink and despair. In this case, however, the final pages suggest that at least one character might find a way out. "I lock the front door behind me and walk down the driveway." This is a cheering moment in a volume where hope is hard to come by, and it briefly lifts the reader's spirits. Moore's distinctive voice commands exceptional power, and she has now reached a point where success should give her the confidence to explore different kinds of fictional freedom.
QUOTED: "Every single story is brilliantly written and structured and has [an] original storyline."
"It is emotive, it is chilling, it is a gem to read."
Tuesday, 16 July 2013
Review: The Pre-War House
Yesterday Salt, the publishers, announced on their twitter feed (which I love) that this week is Salt Summer Reads Week. They invite readers to buy/read/review books published by Salt and spread the world. Salt came on my radar when I read Alison Moore's The Lighthouse and ever since I have kept an eye on what they have been doing. I kinda figure that anyone who would publish The Lighthouse is worth my overenthusiastic attention. This announcement was actually a massively coincidental moment because last weekend I discovered my local bookshop (Kennington Bookshop, which is totally amazing) and in it I found Moore's short story collection The Pre-War House. I finished this spread out in the park as I slowly roasted on Sunday afternoon. So I thought, what better time than Salt Summer Reads week to write and post my review? I couldn't think of a better time so here is my review (took a while to get there, I agree).
I adored Moore's debut because of the mix of simplicity and complexity in her circular narrative. I was not let down by this collection. In fact, Moore is fast becoming one of my favourite authors.
This is a collection of twenty or so short stories of varying lengths and very varying subjects. Yet whilst the subject matter is different in each there are several underlying themes which crop up in each story. Things like the nature of memory, family breakdown, secrets and lies and a general sense of the past creeping up on each of the characters. Some of the stories are soaked in sadness and loneliness and some of the stories are seriously sinister and sent multiple shivers down my spine. But this is not overt 'horror' (for lack of a better word), rather she creates an atmosphere of discomfort pervaded by that niggling feeling that all is not quite as it should be. Clever stuff. I found this in The Lighthouse too; Moore has this skill of saying so much more than she actually does.
As most of you know (because I haven't stopped talking about it for a while), I am reading Anna Karenina. When I finished this collection that famous first line from AK popped into my head and I realised it is perfectly matched to this book. Many of the stories centre around families, all of whom on the surface seem relatively happy (reading some of these stories made me realise that Tolstoy is a complete genius and speaks the truth about families). It is not usually until the end of the story that something is revealed that destroys that assumption of normality. Seriously, some of these revelations felt like a slap round the face, almost like Moore was shaking me and saying 'how did you not see this before?!' A couple of the stories I even re-read after that vital thing had been revealed and it becomes so clear that something is wrong, not obvious, but the word choices are trying to tell you something.
Quite often in story collections there is one that really sticks out as a favourite. Here I find myself unable to pinpoint just one. Every single story is brilliantly written and structured and has a original storyline. There are a couple that I will highlight for a special mention: 'When the Door Closed, it was Dark', 'Overnight Stop', 'Sometimes You Think You are Alone', 'Small Animals', and the title story 'The Pre-War House'. Each of these stories surprised me in some way, made me feel uncomfortable (as only a well crafted story can), and left me questioning my own ability to perceive good and bad or right and wrong.
In a nutshell I would highly, HIGHLY recommend The Pre-War House. It is emotive, it is chilling, it is a gem to read and I could not put it down (no matter how hard I tried to make the experience last). I think exploring Salt's entire catalogue is the only way I can move on from this book. I'm particularly interested in their anthologies of Best British Short Stories. Can anyone recommend a good year to start with?