This novel came to my
attention because it was on the shortlist for the Costa First Novel Award, the
same award that last year brought us Eleanor
Oliphant is Completely Fine. Then I
became more intrigued when I learned that the author wrote this debut novel at
the age of 70.
This is an epistolary
novel featuring the 18-month correspondence between Tina Hopgood, a farmer’s
wife in East Anglia, and Anders Larsen, a curator at the Silkeborge Museum in
Denmark. This museum houses the Tollund
Man, an Iron Age man found in a Danish bog in 1950. An interest in this Tollund Man, who has a
very serene expression on his face, prompts Tina to write to the museum. Slowly a friendship develops between her and
the curator.
Initially, the letters
are very formal. The salutations are “Dear
Mr. Larsen” and “Dear Mrs. Hopgood” and the closings are “Regards, Anders
Larsen, Curator” and “Sincerely, Tina Hopgood”.
Gradually there is a shift in tone to “Dear Tina” and “Dear Anders” and “With
all my good wishes, Anders” and “Love, Tina”.
At first the letters, especially Anders’, are dry and factual but they slowly
become warm and confiding. They express their
thoughts and feelings and discuss regrets, losses, and disappointments, as well
as spouses and children, music and poetry.
Tina mentions that she
writes to help clarify her thoughts: “I
am writing to you to make sense of myself.”
Later, she comments, “when I sit down to write to you it seems as if all
the strings holding my conscious mind together come loose and let my
subconscious leak out.” But the letters
work in other ways as well. Tina says,
“writing to you has begun to feel like talking to [Bella, her best friend who
recently died]” while Anders writes about “the comfort it has given me to be
able to share”. Anders admits that he
begins to pay more attention to the natural world, as Tina does, and that he
listens more carefully because he wants to accurately relate what
happened.
The two correspondents
are very different in many ways. Hers is
an outdoor life full of physical labour and she lives in a cluttered English farmhouse;
his is an indoor, cerebral life and he lives in a Scandinavian house that could
be described as minimalist. But what
they share is more important. They are thoughtful
and reflective and both are lonely.
It is obvious from the
beginning that Tina is not happy with her life.
She married young, “before it was quite the right time” and “became
bogged down, almost literally, in the life of a farmer’s wife. . . . My life
has been a buried one.” She complains
that the farmhouse “and all its contents are like the mud collecting on my
boots as I walk the dog round the fields in a rainy season. Holding me back, weighting me down, limiting
how far I can travel.” She speaks of
feeling that she has “sacrificed my life . . . for nothing” so her life has no
meaning because she has “done so little, achieved so little,” always having a
sense of being “in the wrong room all my life, the room where nothing was
happening.”
Tina also wonders
about the road she did not travel: “what
is it that I have missed by having closed off so many choices so early in my
life?” Anders has similar thoughts: “I wake in the night and wonder if, after
all, I have wasted my chances and should have done something different with the
time and the talents I have been given.”
He thinks about his archaeological work and wonders “whether it was a
worthwhile way to spend a life” and asks Tina, “At least what you do produces
food. How does what I do benefit anyone?”
The theme is that regardless
of age, change is possible. Both Tina
and Anders are of an age when “there is more behind us than ahead of us,” but
they conclude that “Nothing is so fixed it cannot be altered.” A somewhat homely image of picking
raspberries is used to emphasize that a second chance is possible so one does
not overlook “many of the fruits in this life.”
Tina describes picking berries: “Whenever
I pick raspberries, I go as carefully as possible down the row, looking for
every ripe fruit. But however careful I
am, when I turn round to go back the other way, I find fruit I had not seen when
approaching the plants from the opposite direction. Another life, I thought, might be like a
second pass down the row of raspberry canes; there would be good things I had
not come across in my first life.” The
two begin to speak of trying new things as picking raspberries and “the need to
pick as many as possible” in the time given.
On the surface, this
is a simple novel, but its reflections on life and the passage of time are
perceptive. It is a delightful read with
an ending some may not like but I think is perfect. Its style reminded me of Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road, but it has a
more thoughtful tone. Tina speaks of the
Tollund Man and “his serenity, his dignity, his look of wisdom” and that
description fits the book: it is serene,
dignified and wise.
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