Eve Green (2004)

This book was ok. An easy read but slow. ( )

recommended read!: Reviewed by Steve Himmer for Small Spiral Notebook

Susan Fletcher's Whitbread-winning debut Eve Green is a story assembled from secrets, those life has kept from the narrator and those she in turn keeps from the reader. The eponymous Eve is seven when she suddenly loses her mother and is whisked away to her grandparents in rural Wales, to live in the house where her mother grew up. With her observant eye and honest, endearing voice, Eve recalls Cassandra from Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, but with a rich twist. Cassandra sought to order the world by writing, whereas Eve relies on reading what has already been written--in particular, on scraps of paper in a shoebox of her mother's. Those textual fragments provide the only record of the father who vanished before Eve was born, and about whom neither her grandparents nor anyone else in their village will speak.

The novel is narrated by a twenty-nine year old Eve as she awaits the birth of her first child. Recalling the earlier years of her life, she weaves an account of recovering the lives of her parents together with the disappearance of a girl her age from the village and the ensuing panic and suspicions. She also reveals a deep attachment to the Welsh valley and crumbling farmhouse that became her home in childhood and in which she still lives after her grandparents have passed away. This sense of place and belonging is one of the novel's great strengths, counterbalancing Eve's sense of rootlessness, as when she reports that the best view of the valley

comes from the old shepherd's hut on the ridge. My castle. My mossy, windy outpost. I'd charge up there on clear days hoping to spy a distant, hazy Cardigan Bay. I'd lie in wait behind the stones for hikers or birdwatchers or deer, or a glimpse of Billy Macklin before he became my friend. And I had breezy picnics in that tussock grass, secret teenage cigarettes, long daydreams, and I hid there in rainstorms or when I just didn't want to be found.

Vivid passages like these come so often in the novel, and so gracefully, that it is easy to overlook how skillfully Fletcher winds the threads of her story together. Characters and locations are introduced with such subtly that when they take on greater importance later, it feels both surprising and natural at once. Those threads are also tied to the landscape, and the lives of the characters are echoed by the quiet details and slow changes of the place in which they live.

Even as the reader revels in these connections, Eve herself remains unaware, seeing both both the natural and social worlds she lives in almost entirely as a collection of details much like her shoebox of scraps. Of the days following her mother's death and her own relocation she notes,

tap water tastes cleaner in Wales; wet earth has a real, incredible smell to it; clouds are bigger; birds come closer. Flowers seem much brighter out here. I don't know why, but they do.

Eve sees her own body, too, as a jumble of individual parts, owing perhaps to the red hair and freckles she has inherited from her father, and how those distinctive features remind the whole village--Eve's grandparents, too--of the criminal he turns out to have been. This sense of assembling herself as she assembles (and we) assembles her story creates an understated suspense and provides the novel with both intrigue and momentum.

For the most part, Eve Green succeeds at striking a melancholy but hopeful balance between what a young Eve slowly discovers, and what the older, narrating Eve already knows. There is an organic, engaging tension in piecing together the details of her history at the very moment she does the same. Other sources of tension, however, feel a bit forced--in particular, the story of the disappeared girl and the sometimes cloying awareness with which the narrator withholds all she knows of that event. While that disappearance provides a local, more tangible loss through which to reflect on Eve's absent parents, it never becomes quite as convincing as the other strands of the novel. It seems to bear little impact on Eve aside from offering a convenient object of transference, and while this may be a result of the distance between the disappearance itself and the narration, such a violent, tragic event seems to demand more significance than it has been allowed, leaving the suspense it engenders somewhat hollow. The reader is never able to forget that the abducted, tangential character exists only to allow the narrator to discuss herself, and that awareness is cruelly unsettling.

Still, to the credit of the novel and its author, that issue only emerges as problematic because the other elements cohere so naturally, and it should by no means overshadow the larger achievement of a fine debut.

A fine debut novel, full of dense and delicate prose, including wonderful descriptions of rural Wales. While I found the ruminations on impending motherhood intensely irritating, the main story was gripping and incredibly well structured, with parts revealed just as memory really is: piecemeal and gradual, and not necessarily always reliable. ( )

Soothing prose, like a cup of tea and a favorite rocking chair. And the prose remains like soft, rolling green hills even with the undercurrents of a child abduction and the mystery of the red-headed Irishman who is Eve's father. ( )

About a young girl sent to rural Wales after her Mother dies in Birmingham. A young girl has gone missing. Eve Green is expecting her own child and is looking back. Easy to follow and quite lyrical, I quite enjoyed this book. ( )