Poignancy and nostalgia follow a summer on Sark in a novel full of sensuality and wit
Some debut novels are unexceptional coming-of age-stories, others show talent and flair. Happily Rosa Rankin-Gee's lithe, shimmering novel falls into the latter category. Its primary action, which takes place in a few transformative summer weeks in the lives of three young people on the remote Channel island of Sark, holds irresistible tension.
A 21-year-old graduate is flown in a merchant banker's private plane for a short season of tutoring his teenage son. This aura of privilege is countered immediately with the kind of raffish pragmatism that only the very wealthy can pull off – the plane's only other cargo being frozen meat and three crates of Badoit.
Rankin-Gee invests her characters with ambiguity from the start, as the book opens on a gentle Shakespearean gender mix-up which will shade the whole story with paradoxical quirks: "My name is Jude. And because of Law, Hey and the Obscure, they thought I was a boy. Not even a boy. A young man … "
Jude's reluctant charge is Pip, a nervous, fantastically bright 16-year-old who won't meet her eye. Father Eddy is a florid public-school bore; French mother Esmé is rarely glimpsed, and silently inhabits the upper reaches of the house, an elusive, birdlike Miss Havisham or Bertha Rochester-type figure. Eddy and Esmé are only children who have produced an only child; this coincidence includes Jude, and the other person who will make up a fiercely intense triumvirate with her and Pip: Sofi, the hired cook. "Polish," states Eddy dismissively. "Ealing," insists Sofi.
Sofi is the focal point, their unacknowledged leader – "after her stories, ours seemed drawn in the dimmest pencil"– despite her lower status in the pecking order of the household. As staff, she and Jude live out, sharing a basic twin-bedded room in a forlorn establishment that barely passes muster as a hotel. Sofi's frankness, adroit malapropisms and filthy epithets make Jude, the elder by two years, feel immature and awkward, as do the younger woman's unabashed sexiness and boldness: "dirty blonde, dirty tan, denim-blue eyes". The first night Sofi undresses like an unspoken challenge: "She whipped off her top mid-sentence and sat on the edge of the bed, legs open, in a black lace bra."
Rankin-Gee lavishes as much attention on her descriptions of Sark as she does on the golden Sofi. It's an intriguing setting for a novel, this tiny island, rising "out of the sea like a souffle"– the last feudal state in Europe, just two square miles in area, with a population of around 600, where cars are banned and the content of meals depends on what erratically delivered supplies appear in the local store.
The fairly recently departed feudalism is less than subtly present in Eddy's domain; sharp-witted Sofi's initial disdain for Jude is due to the fact that "I was wearing a suit and using the voice I saved for my parents' friends." Sofi uses bravado to cover her lack of formal education, but Jude is something of a fraudulent tutor who doesn't know her Borges from her Hemingway. When Eddy leaves for a business trip, the summer slides into recklessness. Lessons are abandoned, scallop trawled for illegally with Czech casual workers, rosé drunk at noon and rickety bike rides taken in the dark, with Jude always following Sofi's "red bindi" of a backlight. The idyll ends explosively, but also with extreme tenderness, an unforgettable finale to those grubby, prelapsarian weeks.
The novel's extended coda shows Sofi, Pip and Jude at separate moments of their lives two, five and many years later. Sark dwindles or enlarges by turn to become a symbol of heady remembrance, as the story resumes in a rough Normandy bar, the heart of Paris and, later, in England. Reality shows its inevitable face in random deaths and alliances. Rankin-Gee evokes well the locked-in misery of a small, chatteringly anxious child, the loneliness of single parenthood, the sense of futility which can come through never quite making it; all this makes up for the authorial gaucheness in some later scenes.
The instant nostalgia particular to youth is a recurring theme, and in the strong sensuality, witty dialogue and white-heat-forged friendships there is some similarity to Geoff Dyer's 90s classic Paris Trance. Rankin-Gee won legendary bookshop Shakespeare and Company's international Paris literary prize for a version of this book, and it is suffused throughout with love for that city. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 days ago.
Some debut novels are unexceptional coming-of age-stories, others show talent and flair. Happily Rosa Rankin-Gee's lithe, shimmering novel falls into the latter category. Its primary action, which takes place in a few transformative summer weeks in the lives of three young people on the remote Channel island of Sark, holds irresistible tension.
A 21-year-old graduate is flown in a merchant banker's private plane for a short season of tutoring his teenage son. This aura of privilege is countered immediately with the kind of raffish pragmatism that only the very wealthy can pull off – the plane's only other cargo being frozen meat and three crates of Badoit.
Rankin-Gee invests her characters with ambiguity from the start, as the book opens on a gentle Shakespearean gender mix-up which will shade the whole story with paradoxical quirks: "My name is Jude. And because of Law, Hey and the Obscure, they thought I was a boy. Not even a boy. A young man … "
Jude's reluctant charge is Pip, a nervous, fantastically bright 16-year-old who won't meet her eye. Father Eddy is a florid public-school bore; French mother Esmé is rarely glimpsed, and silently inhabits the upper reaches of the house, an elusive, birdlike Miss Havisham or Bertha Rochester-type figure. Eddy and Esmé are only children who have produced an only child; this coincidence includes Jude, and the other person who will make up a fiercely intense triumvirate with her and Pip: Sofi, the hired cook. "Polish," states Eddy dismissively. "Ealing," insists Sofi.
Sofi is the focal point, their unacknowledged leader – "after her stories, ours seemed drawn in the dimmest pencil"– despite her lower status in the pecking order of the household. As staff, she and Jude live out, sharing a basic twin-bedded room in a forlorn establishment that barely passes muster as a hotel. Sofi's frankness, adroit malapropisms and filthy epithets make Jude, the elder by two years, feel immature and awkward, as do the younger woman's unabashed sexiness and boldness: "dirty blonde, dirty tan, denim-blue eyes". The first night Sofi undresses like an unspoken challenge: "She whipped off her top mid-sentence and sat on the edge of the bed, legs open, in a black lace bra."
Rankin-Gee lavishes as much attention on her descriptions of Sark as she does on the golden Sofi. It's an intriguing setting for a novel, this tiny island, rising "out of the sea like a souffle"– the last feudal state in Europe, just two square miles in area, with a population of around 600, where cars are banned and the content of meals depends on what erratically delivered supplies appear in the local store.
The fairly recently departed feudalism is less than subtly present in Eddy's domain; sharp-witted Sofi's initial disdain for Jude is due to the fact that "I was wearing a suit and using the voice I saved for my parents' friends." Sofi uses bravado to cover her lack of formal education, but Jude is something of a fraudulent tutor who doesn't know her Borges from her Hemingway. When Eddy leaves for a business trip, the summer slides into recklessness. Lessons are abandoned, scallop trawled for illegally with Czech casual workers, rosé drunk at noon and rickety bike rides taken in the dark, with Jude always following Sofi's "red bindi" of a backlight. The idyll ends explosively, but also with extreme tenderness, an unforgettable finale to those grubby, prelapsarian weeks.
The novel's extended coda shows Sofi, Pip and Jude at separate moments of their lives two, five and many years later. Sark dwindles or enlarges by turn to become a symbol of heady remembrance, as the story resumes in a rough Normandy bar, the heart of Paris and, later, in England. Reality shows its inevitable face in random deaths and alliances. Rankin-Gee evokes well the locked-in misery of a small, chatteringly anxious child, the loneliness of single parenthood, the sense of futility which can come through never quite making it; all this makes up for the authorial gaucheness in some later scenes.
The instant nostalgia particular to youth is a recurring theme, and in the strong sensuality, witty dialogue and white-heat-forged friendships there is some similarity to Geoff Dyer's 90s classic Paris Trance. Rankin-Gee won legendary bookshop Shakespeare and Company's international Paris literary prize for a version of this book, and it is suffused throughout with love for that city. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 days ago.