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Only Human reviews
There is more than a hint of the sharply humorous style of
Muriel Spark in
this pleasantly quirky novel. Marjorie, its heroine, was widowed
before her
marriage really began, yet she now spends her days counselling
couples at an
advisory centre for “marital relations”. Her daughter,
anorexic and alienated,
has moved out of their home, and the chief respite Marjorie
has for her aching
loneliness comes from her encounters with fans who mistake her
for the star of
a popular television hospital soap. Boyt paints the unravelling
of her
heroine’s tenuous grip on reality with economical but
expressive brush strokes — and
delivers more than a few deliciously comic moments along the
way.
The Sunday Times
Stevie Davies enjoys Susie Boyt's compulsive and compassionate
tale of loss
To this compulsively readable novel about mourning, Susie Boyt
has brought an attentive observation gleaned from her work as
a bereavement counsellor, linked with humour and an artist's
compassionate sensibility. Boyt, daughter of Lucian, great-granddaughter
of Sigmund, is a Freud without being a systematic freudian. Only
Human is a sustained act of humane understanding.
Marjorie, a marriage guidance counsellor, lost her husband 17
years ago after a bare two-and-a-half years of marriage which
left her with a treasured baby, May, on whom she has thrown the
weight of her own need. Sane and authoritative as she appears,
Marjorie is secretly unhinged. The power of Boyt's remarkable
novel lies in its discovery of a language capable of rendering
a psyche utterly at a loss, behind the brittle screen of a public
demeanour. I was reminded of George Eliot's observation in Middlemarch
that "behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there
must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our
timorous lips more or less under anxious control". For Marjorie's
is an ordinary derangement. We have all been there, or somewhere
nearby.
The sessions in which Marjorie counsels her dysfunctional clients
are sheer theatre. The novel's structure works in a rhythm of
scenes in which couples perform the banal and bizarre dramas
that display human nature at its most mad (and normal): he "said
I looked like a rat's abortion", complains one wife. The
husband deplores her failure to grasp his sense of humour. In
another couple, the performative nature of the family dynamic
takes the form of 10 minutes' hysterical sobbing in a "sadness...
so deep and high and sheer that Marjorie found herself regarding
it with the highest admiration".
As it turns out, Marjorie is a lousy counsellor. Her investment
in keeping couples together is a displacement of her own compulsion
to clasp the dead Hugh, to hold herself together and not to notice
how bereft she is. As Marjorie falls apart, so does her ability
to continue her "lively servicing of... old wounds".
Beautiful writing blends with inventive plot conceits, the most
poignant of which is Marjorie's accidental detection under the
bed of a 17-year-old Christmas stocking, packed with faded parcels:
Hugh's present, as she thinks, to herself. She shoves it back
under the bed. At the end of the novel, it is passed by mother
to daughter, who begins to unpack the gifts, her inheritance
of her father's love.
Stevie Davies - The Guardian 28 August, 2004
Cruelty is almost a luxury
Readers might suspect that a novel that opens with a marriage
guidance session is already beyond hope. But there's nothing
to say that hopelessness can't be extremely funny and dementedly
engaging. In Only Human, Mark Braintree cheerily confesses to
having compared his wife, in a red and brown party dress, to
a rat's abortion. Helen Braintree, chin jutting high, admits
that these little chips at her self-esteem do "stay with''
her. There was the time that the couple had planned a romantic
restaurant date and Mark brought a book: "A biography of
all things. Berlioz." Berlioz is said to have died of a
broken heart. Only his heart wasn't broken by a lover, but by
the unenthusiastic reception of his opera about the Trojan war.
Susie Boyt doesn't explain this detail to readers of her fourth
novel. It's just planted there like a wooden horse. We all
agree, fleetingly, with Helen, that such behaviour is just
typical of Mark. Then we realise that Helen is so smugly right
that we rather sympathise with the spouse who goads her so
deliciously. Aren't other people's disastrous relationships
fun when you get to wade right into them without any interfering
mud on your wellies?
Marjorie Hemming, a counsellor at the Wellbeck Centre for Marital
Relations and the heroine of Only Human, never wades in. "You
had to remember,'' she tells herself, "all marriages were
bizarre places, rife with signs and codes and unimaginable sharp
practice where the more insane aspects of human nature flourished,
were endured, tolerated, overlooked, sought out and sometimes
even admired." Marjorie's own brief, rosy-hued experience
of marriage has taught her that.
Boy, can Boyt write about self-deception. About how, at its worst,
it only works 90 per cent of the time, leaving its victim pacing
in the night. Marjorie closes her evenings with the "acid
fuzz" of a grapefruit and a pot of Sleeptight tea, counting
slanging matches the way others do sheep. The thought that "it
feels so much better with him hating me than when I have to hate
myself" sinks through our heroine's stomach. Cruelty to
a loved one seems almost a luxury to Marjorie, who loved kindly
and has nobody. Her house is full of empty chairs, a domestic
version of an unattended seminar.
Only Human ends with some of the arguments and situations in
motion, others unaddressed, a few resolved. What is surprising
is the amount of stored laughter and banked-up optimism you retain
from the wreckage of these fictional lives. Reading this book
is like plugging your emotional battery-charger into the mains.
Its crisply original, unshowy language tingles with static; its
insight jolts dangerously; its gags spark and sputter cleverly.
Yet Only Human leaves you feeling warm and solid despite and
because of your own - ultimately limited - capacities.
Helen Brown - The Telegraph, 16 August 2004
“ The Braintrees were at each other’s throats again”;
a cracking first line for a novel. And the reader is neatly wrong-footed,
too, on the same page, with the realisation that this is not
going to be a domestic drama, but that we are observers at a
marriage-guidance counselling session. The counselling trade
is fair game for literary satire, but that is not what Susie
Boyt is after here — although she has a deft touch both
with the customers and the kind of language involved in these
encounters. For the story is not about the counselled but about
Marjorie, the counsellor, who is plump, good-hearted, fortyish
and imbued with a passionate belief in the value of marriage
as an institution.
Clients of the Wellbeck Centre for Marital Studies pay no fees,
but present themselves for sessions that most of Marjorie’s
flock appear to regard as ritual torment. Or do they? Boyt is
a dab hand at dialogue and it is soon evident that the gruesome
Braintrees, and maybe others, are acting out with relish a public
presentation of their permanent and essential state of strife.
Marjorie’s bland and self-effacing interjections are in
nice contrast to the verbal violence of the embattled couples,
not that some of that doesn’t get deflected onto her: “I
presume you have your own kind of intelligence,” spits
Mark Braintree.
The couples on display are, in fact, a backcloth; it is Marjorie
who is centre stage. She is a Pollyanna figure, always determinedly
counting blessings, but also an insomniac armed with a battery
of pills, in anguish because her 17-year-old daughter has flown
the nest for a student pad. And her own marriage ended abruptly;
her husband died when she was 26. Marjorie is a neat creation;
the story is told from her point of view, but we also look over
her shoulder and recognise her distresses and fatal commitment
to the sanctity of marriage, not shared by brisker colleagues
(“even the Samaritans aren’t allowed to try to prevent
someone from committing suicide if they want to”).
Indeed, the crunch comes when some clients complain about her
determination to save every marriage. Marjorie is forced into
some painful self-analysis, and it is at this point that the
novel starts to lose direction. Its early robust control falters
with a saccharine scene between Marjorie and the errant daughter,
and the ending is distinctly mawkish. It is as though Marjorie’s
fatal tendency to seek a rosy resolution has eclipsed the author’s
own sharp and realistic vision.
That said, there is much here to enjoy. Minor characters are
vibrant, especially the wilder reaches of Marjorie’s benighted
clients, and I relished some turns of phrase: “the unimaginable
sharp practice of marriage” — ah, yes. And Fidelity
as a Moral Achievement is a delight as a chapter heading in Marjorie’s
professional manual.
Penelope Lively - The Sunday Times, 11 July 2004
" Widowed marriage guidance counsellor Marjorie Hemming
is experiencing something of a crisis herself; her teenage daughter
has moved
out and seems intent on
deflecting all Marjorie's well-meant interference, while Marjorie
comes
increasingly to identify herself with the heroine of a popular
soap. Susie Boyt's
fourth novel is a sharp and funny portrait of people trying to
find
connections as their lives unravel around them."
The Observer - 11 July 2004
"A wonderful novel about grief, desperation and the quiet
unravelling that can take place within us while the world goes
about its business. It's also painfully funny, and spot-on in
its beady observations about contemporary life. What an achievement!"
Deborah Moggach - author of Tulip Fever
"Susie Boyt's book is outstanding in its ability to convey,
simultaneously, the extremes of intimacy and detachment in a way
that is both comical and moving. Her language is lethally economic,
her judgment acute. Her novel shows a remarkable ability to observe
the freakish nuances of human nature, and the madness that passes
for normality in the average marriage."
Miranda Seymour
Both funny and painful. Delighting in quiet detail...Boyt lends
grace and
elegance to this tale of an ordinary woman trying to be good
in a difficult
world.
Daily Mail
A serious and accomplished novelist...both moving and delightfully
comic...written with elegant assurance
Scotsman
A fresh and wholly idiosyncratic take on life.
The Independent
Her most self assured book yet, by turns funny and sad
Telegraph
A sharp and funny protrait of people trying to find connections
as their
lives unravel around them
Observer
She has a knack for vivid, atmospheric description and regularly
evinces a
keen understanding of what makes people tick.
Sunday Business Post
Buy It
Daily Mirror
"The book's insight and wit keep the reader interested....full
of
illuminating ideas about loss and loneliness."
Sunday Telegraph
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