Page 33 - Phonebox July 2013

BOOK REVIEW
By Oxfam Bookshop, Olney
Tel: 01234 714592
‘A elma Shacklad’y
nita Shreve is a proli c writer of light, well-written novels, and ‘Rescue’ is one of her more recent ones. Her main character, Webster
is a ‘probie’ – probationer – working part-time with the Hartstone Rescue Squad when he is called out with the paramedic to a road traf c accident involving a young woman, Sheila, who has driven into a tree. There is something which attracts him to her, and he maintains a link, visiting the hospital and eventually nding out her whereabouts once she has been discharged. The attraction proves mutual, and in due course she becomes pregnant and they are married. However, she has a problem; she is an alcoholic, which eventually causes a marital breakdown, and Webster becomes a single parent to his daughter.
The first part of the novel concerns the relationship between Webster and Sheila, the second part is concerned with father and daughter, now seventeen. I’m sure many parents will smile wryly as they read about that relationship! One of the issues inevitably is about what makes a young person act as they do – nature or nurture? Rowan resembles her mother in looks and in certain other ways, and there are issues which cause her father great heartache. This part of the book I nd very accurately described, and it is also interesting to consider how the lack of a mother has affected the daughter. The title ‘Rescue’ refers not only to Webster’s job with the rescue squad, but also to what he attempts to do for Sheila, what he struggles to do for his daughter, and the question arises, ‘Can he succeed?’
This is a good book to take on holiday, undemanding yet interesting, the characters well-drawn and believable, and the questions which are raised thought-provoking. Thorough research has obviously been undertaken into the activities associated with rescue teams and their procedures are described in some detail. It is a suitable read for the beach or for anywhere else where the reader can relax and enjoy it.
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Sandra Metcalf
H
ow amazing are the extraordinary lives of seemingly ordinary people. And this is a story of several extraordinary lives.
fill all the gaps in her story. His father’s life was more straightforward but far from ordinary. Bill Lanchester was brought up in Africa and the Far East, when the Japanese prepared to invade Hong Kong in 1940 he was evacuated, at the age of 13, to Australia on his own. There were kindly acquaintances who kept an eye on him but for two years Bill didn’t know if his parents were alive or dead. His only course of action was ‘to get on with things’, mostly getting an education, which he did.
John did eventually discover his mother’s secret, which stemmed from a decision she made when about to marry Bill Lanchester. It was a bold, even an understandable decision, and not a particularly dramatic one – a last bid for the life she wanted. But the risk of discovery would affect her behaviour for the rest of her life and consequently affect those around her. John Lanchester believed that only through finding out about his parents’ lives could he learned to understand himself. ‘There are times when storytelling is indispensible; there are times when we have to tell a story about something to make sense of it. Julie couldn’t tell the story of her own life . . . I don’t think she could tell it even to herself. That left me with a deep, unappeasable wish to connect the dots and tell the story for myself – and also, perhaps, for her.’
When John Lanchester was asked, after his mother’s death, what he would like carved on her grave stone he realised that he didn’t have an answer. The only child of older parents he had grown up with the sense that ‘there was another, fuller, darker narrative looming behind the various short stories my mother told so well and so funnily.’ The question was dif cult to answer because his mother, Julie, had rarely talked about her life and had never answered questions about it - in fact she had developed a gift for avoiding any discussion related to her past. ‘I want to ask your mother things about her childhood,’ a friend once said to me, ‘but I can’t. I don’t know how she does that.’ No one did – but the ‘Keep Out signs’ were unmistakable, leaving John unsure of even the most basic facts about her life.
Setting out to nd ‘the story of my mother’s life, which is also the story of my father’s life, and to an extent far greater than I realised when I began this journey, the story of mine too,’ he discovered, with the help of his Mother’s family, who came from County Mayo in the West of Ireland, a lot about her early life including the fact that she had been a nun but had left her religious order not once but twice. But even they did not
Phonebox Magazine 33