Blood Ties by Jennifer Lash
My rating: 3/5 cats
i wish this book had grabbed me more than it did. on paper, it is my kind of story: irish family, various tragedies, wild natural setting, sorrows spanning generations…that is my kind of yummy right there. and the author—underknown female novelist, mother of those fiennes brothers, artistic promise terminated by tragic illness, critical accolades, commercially forgotten…this book had promise smeared all over it.
and yet i thought it was only okay.
i think where it lost me was the writing style and the characterization. i have no problem with a densely-written story. in fact, that is my preference with sweeping family dramas. i like detail, i like thick prose. but this was just too ruminative with repetitive characterization and very little action, and the characters consistently did things that were baffling, abrupt, and had immediate life-changing consequences that seemed unrealistic, psychologically.
some examples:
View Spoiler »the story itself was good—a study of the consequences of neglect, filtering down through the generations. it begins with cecil and violet—a marriage one part convenience, one part exhausted disappointment, one part stifling homosexual urges, and they maintain a distant, baffled attachment to each other. violet spends most of her time alone, aloof, wandering the moors with her beloved dog, the only creature in the world she is able to feel any affection towards. eventually, this marriage produces a son, whom neither of its parents show any interest in whatsoever. they are fairly old when he is born, and cecil has been slipping into an addled condition that is highly routinized and solitary. violet is mostly disgusted with lumsden’s existence, and resents his presence in her life, relying on a nanny to see to his development after he disappoints her by not showing early signs of exceptionality. the three of them coexist uneasily, lumsden is sent to england for school, returning for brief visits until during one of these visits, he gets caught in a compromising situation with a camera and three little first communion girls, whereupon he is shipped off to england permanently.
once he is there, having been invited not to return to his school, he has no prospects or skills, and becomes an opportunist, getting involved in a sort of con situation and almost inadvertently knocking up a girl named dolly, with her own checkered past of bad decisions, madness, and parental disappointment. by the time she knows she is preggers, he is long gone, and she is forced to raise their child alone, without resources or support.
if violet was baffled by the birth of lumsden, dolly is horrified by the presence of her son spencer. she refuses to put him up for adoption, for reasons that are muddled but seem to center on her holding on to some kind of dream she had about the one-time magic she had in the barn with lumsden—when she felt that her life still had possibilities.
her treatment of spencer is abysmal, criminal, horrifying. her abuse and neglect turn him into an incredibly damaged child, retreating into himself, unable to communicate except in howls and frantic masturbation. dolly’s friend tug eventually takes over the care of spencer, living with dolly and witnessing her alcoholism, her parade of lovers, and her cruelty towards spencer. eventually, there is a breaking point, and tug manages to track down lumsden, who wants nothing to do with spencer or dolly, but who agrees, with malicious glee, to have the child sent to violet.
tug, not knowing anything about lumsden’s upbringing, thinks that the irish countryside, animals, fresh air, and loving grandparents will be just the thing to wash the taint of dolly off of him.
it couldn’t be any worse, right?
well.
it’s not great. if violet couldn’t cope with a “normal” child, she’s not going to be able to cope with a terribly damaged three-year old who has just been separated not only from his poisonous mother, but also from tug, the only person who has ever shown him any kindness, and sent off to an unfamiliar and desolate palce. violet is even older now, and cecil has fallen even further down the tunnel of incompetence. it is not an ideal place for a boy to heal.
and that’s all the plot i am going to give—i’m sorry if it sounds like i gave away too much already. but i wanted to give a sort of rough outline of the situation; how some people are just ill-equipped to be parents and their self-involvement does have consequences that persist through generations.
there is a lot of plot after this point, so i don’t think i have given away too much, and i wish there were more reviews of this book on here to balance my own, because i think this book does have a reader, but the stifling prose and repetitive dwelling on the internal monologues of the anxious made me a little anxious myself, a little impatient to just get on with the story.
it’s definitely not a bad book, but it was not the right book for me at this time.
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