4 Stars
Sarah Moss is one of my must-read authors. Ripeness, like her other novels, has thematic depth which cannot but impress.
There is a dual timeline, both focused on Edith Braithwaite. In the late 1960s, she is 17 and bound for Oxford when her mother dispatches her from the family farm in Derbyshire to a villa in the Lake Como region of Italy. She is to look after her unmarried sister Lydia, a ballet dancer, who is pregnant. Once the child is born, Edith is to insure that the child is picked up by French nuns who will arrange for its adoption. This timeline is narrated in first person by Edith.
In 2023, Edith is 73. After a divorce, she is happily living on the west coast of Ireland where she has started a relationship with Gunter, a German potter. Her best friend Méabh learns about a half-brother who was given up for adoption and of whose existence no one had been aware. This inspires Edith to write a letter to her nephew, the one given up for adoption: “an account, an explanation – expiation? - for Lydia’s son to find if he comes looking when she’s gone.” This timeline is narrated in third person.
Half a century passes between the two timelines and it’s interesting to read the older Edith’s comments about her teenaged self and what she’s learned since: “I had all the certainty of adolescence and I was a prude and I hope and believe I would have had kinder and better instincts even a year or two later” and “in those days it still seemed to me that directness was truth and indirectness lying, that there was only one way to be honest.”
I loved the writing style. Parts read like an interior monologue and others are more stream-of-consciousness: “Fingers numbing, weed gone or not felt by the toes, time’s up, body for the dry land again, turn, water-pull, ocean-pull, beach-pull, foot grazes sand, stumbles, swim on, a while yet, wave, no salt-slap now, face already salt, already cold, already sea, hair-weed on salt-neck, grounding, grounding, feet meet sand, sand meet feet, bodyweight, lift, walk. Hello, air, earth, elements.” Dialogue is not indicated by punctuation. Literary allusions abound; reference is made to Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Milton.
The novel develops a number of themes, a major one being immigration/displacement and belonging. Edith’s mother was a Jewish refugee and in the present there are refugees from the war in Ukraine. There are protests against the use of a local hotel as emergency housing for African refugees. And, despite having lived in Ireland for a long time, Edith feels like an outsider, never “local enough.” So what does it mean to belong? Now divorced, she enjoys her autonomy, the freedom and ability to make her own decisions and act independently, but does such autonomy preclude belonging? When Méabh’s American half-brother writes to say “he wants to see where he comes from,” Edith wonders why “He, who has never set foot in this place, comes from here, and she . . . remains a stranger.” She believes that “national identity isn’t generic, that blood doesn’t give you rights of ownership, whatever the passport rules say. Méabh’s brother can’t just come here and call it home, say he belongs, when nothing she or the Ukrainians do will ever entitle them to say such things . . . It’s all blood and soil, all nativism, this confusion of biology and citizenship.” Edith advises her nephew to “be free of all that, that’s my advice. You’ll belong by caring for people and places. You can’t go home, wanderer. You come from where you were last. . . . We’re all wanderers. We all live dangerously, the brave thing is to know it.”
Other topics are also touched on. One is the impact of mothers on their children: Edith’s mother was largely absent so Edith thinks “I went on trying so hard for so many years not to be Maman that perhaps I forgot, forgot how to be myself” and wishes “Maman had been there, had been able to be there, when we were growing up, had been able to show my beautiful sister how not” to live fast and glamorously. There are comments about men being hurt by patriarchy “for their unvoiced fears and emotional deficits.” Reference is made to rape culture, unwanted pregnancies, and the Magdalene Laundries. Being English, Edith often gives voice to relations between the Irish and English: “You can still blame the English . . . for the way Irish people didn’t or couldn’t resist the power of the Church once independence came. Assertiveness could be fatal under English rule and it takes generations to forget those lessons.”
Perhaps because I am close to Edith’s age, I agreed with many of her observations. As I’ve often commented, there’s little difference between a nun’s habit and a traditional Muslim woman’s dress; Edith compares a nun’s “black veil secured somehow under the chin, like an uncannily stiff hijab.” She refers to a Biblical story that has always bothered me: “Abraham and Isaac which has always seemed to me more a test of human decency than of faith and therefore a test that Abraham fails. If your god tells you to kill a child, find another god.” Some of her comments are more light-hearted: “a water bottle, what is it with the under-fifties and water, really, love, we all used to go hours without water, lunch until dinner, did no harm at all.” I loved her rant about scented candles which “will rejuvenate, relax, restore you. They will nourish and uplift and replenish, in all ways prepare you to continue to provide service and comfort uninterrupted by your own ageing or fatigue or hunger. How about actual rest, . . . how about a proper meal and a long walk and an afternoon with your mates, only that might inconvenience a man or child or take up resources a man or a child might want so why don’t you light a little candle and smell the pretty smell while you iron your pretty tablecloth, crone?”
My husband and I visited Ireland last fall and spent three weeks driving around the country so some of the descriptions brought back fond memories. Like Edith, we loved the Burren, though not so much the constant rain on the “cold wet coast of a cold wet island.” We did drive the Wild Atlantic Way and so I chuckled at Edith’s comment that “whoever thought of renaming the N67 deserves either a life-changing bonus or pushing off the Cliffs of Moher . . . [because] there might be challenges involved in navigating a narrow coastal road in variable weather on the unaccustomed side.” And yes, we wondered about the Irish “signing boreens as 90 kilometres an hour.” That might be “a maximum, not a recommendation, eejit,” but we couldn’t imagine that speed as a reasonable maximum on narrow country lanes.
This novel is slow-paced but that’s not a criticism. It is so skillfully and beautifully written that a reader must take time to savour, and there is so much insight that a reader must take time to think.
If you haven’t read Sarah Moss before, I also recommend four other of her novels that I have read:
Summerwater: https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2021/05/review-of-summerwater-by-sarah-moss.html
The Tidal Zone: https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2021/05/review-of-tidal-zone-by-sarah-moss.html
The Fell: https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2022/03/review-of-fell-by-sarah-moss-new-release.html
Ghost Wall: https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2020/11/review-of-ghost-wall-by-sarah-moss.html
Note: I received an eARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
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