All Bones and Lies by Anne Fine.

                     All Bones and Lies  by Anne Fine.

"No-one should be expected, for love or duty or anything else, to have to put up with  having their very sense of self being chipped away minute by minute."

Let's pose this one to start with. How do you find a way through the frustrations of caring for an elderly relative, especially a difficult one, so that love, or whatever we want to call it can survive to the bitter end? More relevantly, is it possible? Anne Fine thinks so. I like the way she has presented the twins, Colin and Dilys, as different as chalk and cheese, one who decides to do right by Norah whereas the other sibling remains adamant in her choice not to have any more contact with her mother, feeling bitter and angry. A five year rift seems a long time especially when the mother is old and becoming frail. Colin, as the mediator, tries to persuade his sister to make the first move but fails miserably. So, what should you do?

Norah is a difficult woman;that's an understatement. There is an astuteness in the way that Anne Fine has depicted Norah's selfishness. Initially, she is described as a crow, or a vulture, take your pick, both aptly chosen images showing her "pecking away at the scraps of him (Colin)before he was even dead." Images flash through his mind of ending his torment and taking a hatchet from his woodshed, his place of retreat with Suzie, a magazine picture showing this 19 year old falling as he overindulges his sexual fantasies: "it gave him pleasure to think about how those pretty buttocks might be, first trembling in anticipation, then clenched in shock" and his spells, to murder his mother. She is also described as being notoriously miserable and showing unsparing self-pity, alias Our lady of the Sorrows. She hoarded old misfortunes "fetching them out regularly for a brush and polish." As for Dilys, she shows her cynicism: "They're so wrapped up in their own little ways of burning up their twisted energies that they forget other people actually exist."

It seems difficult to imagine poor Colin tolerating his mother's constant insults and sarcasm, her "impregnable cynicism" but he maintains regular visits, does her shopping, persuades her to eat an oven-ready meal which he has brought for her and makes endless cups of tea, alleviating any sense of guilt he might have felt had he been the absent child like his sister. But is Dilys capable of feeling guilty? Probably not.

Dilys works in Corporate Sponsorship for a company called Tor. She could be scathing and insensitive but wasn't considered malicious. She was notorious in picking up womenfolk with a passion, such as Perdita, Val and Marjorie before dropping them as quickly. Colin tells us that she "chewed them up and spat them out."

Colin worked for the council as an Environmental Health Officer. He described his life as "pathetic," a life no-one cared about. If he died, no-one would miss him except perhaps Norah who depended on him for practical support. He had hidden behind Dilys, inadequate, painfully timid, clumsy as a child and deemed a failure at school where he was constantly mocked and bullied. He would skivvy for the neighbours and this plagued him throughout his adult life. The good news is that he develops in confidence and by the end of the novel, he shows more control and becomes more relaxed and of course, happier as a person.

He harbours a sense of horror thinking of an incident that became significant in his life, offering a much needed lifeline. It involved a potentially tragic accident when a baby was catapulted from her pram after being hit by a car, two years ago. Dilys proved to be an unlikely heroine: "The way she walked down the street now, you would have thought all she had reached up to catch that one, steel-blue morning was a ball" and not a "pink and flying baby into her hands." Everything and everyone had frozen in time. The incident had haunted Colin and as a consequence he befriended Mel, the mother and became close to her daughter, Tammy who he soon grew to adore. He daydreamed over caring for Mel and organising Tammy's life from her choice of schools to marching her down the aisle.

 Mel lived in a grotty flat, in a grim area of Chesterton Court, sharply contrasting with pretty suburban West Priding where Norah lived. Mel's secret life involved being a trapeze artist known as one half of an act called Las Venturas.  Colin is impressed by this "celestial magic" which had sadly become the "drabbest of life he could imagine." Just like his own life. He had found Mel's strange indifference and willowy passivity coupled to her attitude of "take and take" extremely off-putting until gleaning of her magical world of the circus. In his highly imaginative world, Colin thought of marrying Mel and moving her away from this poverty, providing for her and her adorable Tammy; he wanted the child but not a wife. His "vision of parental bliss" was being able to take Tammy out to an ice cream parlour!

Daily visits to his mother which he compares to a "grim pilgrimage" brings with it a realisation of how "horribly old" she looked. Colin's life seemed to be following a dreary and similar pattern to his unfortunate father, of indifference, before his alleged suicide. Norah secretly changes her insurance policy which Colin finds is inadequate and he constantly worries about her faulty appliances in case of fire risk.

Norah's birthday seems to be a pivotal time for Colin, especially when he started to see his mother in a different light, a "new charitable understanding of his own mother." A nasty bout of food poisoning means a stay in hospital for one unfortunate character followed by three freak fires which allow some of the characters to start afresh. A black card is issued and instead of pay-back time Colin adopts a caring stance: "He'd do right by her. as good as anyone could hope for." Perhaps Norah didn't deserve such kindness but don't they say that blood is thicker than water? And, if anything, Colin makes a decent decision to be good to his mother.

Publisher: Black Swan Books.  ISBN: 0-552-99898-2.

REVIEW it by Carol Naylor.

Copyright 2016. Permission must be obtained from the author before any of this article review is reproduced.