FICTION: All the Beggars Riding, By Lucy Caldwell, Faber and Faber, 253pp, £12.99
Lara, the narrator of the young Belfast writer Lucy Caldwell’s third novel, has spent most of her life living in the shadow of various lies. With the discovery of her father’s secret, her childhood ends abruptly, and a few months later he dies in a helicopter crash. For years, Lara had managed to get by in London, keep her job as a daycare worker and sustain a half-hearted relationship. Then the need to establish the humanity behind the facts forces her to look for the truth, however distressing the effort.
There is a blunt candour about this book that proves to be Caldwell’s anchor. A brief prologue addressed to the narrator’s mother is written in the softly lit prose of a romantic novel. It could cause a reader to turn away. But the story quickly moves on to a dramatic sequence about a television documentary charting the aftermath of the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in April 1986. Witnesses describe the agonising deaths of the initial victims, the men working in the plant: they bled to death from inside, vomiting their internal organs.
Lara, now approaching 40, remembers the tragedy because it had happened only months after the death of her father. The programme comes on one night, about a year after her unhappy mother died, determined to the end, even to the point of refusing treatment. In ways, Lara’s experience and, most particularly, that of her mother are also slow deaths. Caldwell’s prose is uneven, shifting between the factual and the overly descriptive. She also risks sending her narrator to a creative-writing course: Lara, lost and alone, puts all her energy into her patients, one of whom enrols in a writing class, and Lara accompanies him. Now, as an orphan, tolerated by her loving brother’s wife and children, she decides to write about her past. The outcome is the book.
A family holiday in Spain proves both the beginning and the end of the story. Lara recalls how the anticipation of the trip preoccupied her and her younger brother. It would be the first time out of England for them. But Lara had been away once before, to Belfast. When she mentions this, her mother reacts with a wild display of anger. (The memory of it causes Lara to make one of many references to her mother’s tiny frame.) She makes Lara promise never to refer to that trip again. The mother adds that when the children are older, she will explain.
Caldwell then reverts to a wordy, clunky prose that frequently undermines the stylistic balance of this novel. “It was she who looked old, suddenly. In less than the time it took her to say those words, she had aged centuries, millennia, and I felt a gulf between us, an abyss, that could never be bridged. A child should never see the depths of its parent’s sorrow. You can never forget it, once you’ve seen something like that: it is irrevocable.”
Lara is sympathetic, but her use of language is heavy and often awkward. Caldwell’s intention to create a character who is not a writer – although she is aspiring to write – leaves the narrative, and Caldwell, in a no-man’s-land. Yes, there is a story to be told; yes, here is a character with a troubled past and an uneasy present. Lara often apologises for her storytelling.
Caldwell does not make it easy for herself. Yet the flatter passages work better than the more literary ones, which tend towards stagy cliches highlighting the stylistic and narrative limitations: “A moment later, they were in each other’s arms. Our father was a huge bear of a man, well over six feet tall and broad with it, and our mother was a little bird of a creature. He swamped her – engulfed her – lifted her off her feet with the force of his embrace . . . I rushed back to them, too, sucked in by their force field.”
Double family
The shadowy father, a plastic surgeon whose work is divided between Belfast during the Troubles and a Harley Street practice, is evoked as a visitor who walks in and out of the lives of Lara, her mother and Alfie, Lara’s little brother. Father appears loving and mercurial. He is also very busy, as he has a wife and children living with him in Belfast. The reason he is late for that first and only holiday in Spain with Lara and her mother and brother is that he is already there, staying in a hotel farther up the coast with his wife.
Caldwell presents the father not as a hero but as an attractive rogue intent on keeping both families. Her mother, quiet and determined, the most unlikely partner for the dashing doctor, settles in to wait for her lover to leave his wife. He doesn’t. All of this is slowly pieced together by Lara, who realises that the story is not really hers: it is her mother’s. But the dying woman who “didn’t want someone else’s heart in her” remains determined and says little, other than insisting she would do it all the same again.
But this is not really a love story. Instead of writing a novel about a doomed romance as witnessed by a child and reconstructed by a grieving, lonely adult, Lara comes to see that “it wasn’t love, it was desperation and addiction, and a shared guilt, and a need for that guilt”. Lara realises that her mother was never happy; “it was shrivelling her up inside.”
In the absence of art, there is no mistaking a cool intelligence at work here. The most moving image is of Lara’s grandmother, painstakingly dressed in her best clothes, making the long journey from Yorkshire to London with a suitcase of prepared meals for her daughter, Lara’s mother. But the old lady’s efforts and pleas for a rethink are rejected. Lara’s mother, intent on her fate, remains with her married lover.
Caldwell’s prose fails to seduce, and the predictable narrative fades, ending with a quiet sigh of relief. Yet there are sufficient flint and hurts absorbed to render Lara’s journey of discovery convincingly real, if patchily executed.
