SENSES WORKING OVERTIME

“Between my legs the smell is complex. I touch myself, of course I do, for acute sensation. What do they expect me to do in here? And my fingers smell of the seaside, a weedy smell, salty, frondy. Under my arms the sweat has dried to ginger, my feet smell of cheese, my skin tastes of fish and salt and yeast. Oh I am so rich in perfume! I am a grocer’s shop, a Christmas hamper. I could eat myself for lunch. Oh Christ but I am bored.”

The above paragraph contains some of the thoughts of Jennifer, the main protagonist of Lesley Glaister’s new novel, who is in solitary confinement having been imprisoned for a crime whose nature is only revealed at the end of the book.

Submitted by publishers Hamish Hamilton for this year’s Booker Prize but disappointingly not shortlisted, Partial Eclipse is a brilliant, unsettlingly visceral description of what in lesser hands could be mundane subject matter.

In the novel, Glaister’s fifth, three stories run parallel before being eventually woven together. There is the section devoted to Jennifer’s thoughts while incarcerated, the story of her student affair with a much older academic, and the imagined history of her forbear Peggy Maybee, who was transported on a convict ship to Australia.

Because of this and the density of the prose you finish what is a fairly slim volume (215 pages) feeling as though you have read a much thicker tome.

A BIT PERVERSE

“People who know me are really surprised by my books,” says Glaister. “They see a much darker side of me in my writing than they do in my everyday life. And I feel quite relieved about that in a way. I quite like the fact that I’m not too nice.”

Indeed it’s slightly incongruous that the petite, friendly Glaister is the author of what one critic described as “a haunting, even a distressing book.”

The section dealing with Jennifer’s seven days in solitary confinement (she sucks a love bite on the inside of her arm to mark each day) is a neat literary paradox – a brilliant and vivid description of sensory deprivation.

“I knew that I wanted to write about a woman in prison,” says the author. “I don’t know why, I think perhaps it was the challenge of someone confined and having to use their own resources to survive. It does seem a bit perverse to write about someone in the most boring situation imaginable,” she laughs.

“The walls are the same colour as the floor. That is the worst of it. What I would not give for a splash of brightness. But it is all somewhere between grey and beige, a fungal colour, and so is my dress and so is the food and so is my skin in the dimness. Women bite themselves. Bite their arms until they bleed. Self mutilation, evidence of deep disturbance. Perhaps they simply want to see some colour, the bright luxurious glossy red of blood.”

How did she manage to imagine herself into that place and its total lack of sensory stimulation?

“I found that quite easy actually,” smiles Glaister. “I don’t know why but I think in a sense the whole thing about the book is that it’s akin to a writer sitting down in a little room and creating a world out of the memory and the imagination. I wasn’t thinking that when I was writing it but looking back at the book it’s almost as if it mimics the process of being a writer.”

Glaister began writing seriously when in her early thirties. After college she got married and then got a job with the DHSS which she hated, while she and her husband saved up enough money to drop out and become self sufficient. They moved to Sheffield before separating in 1984. They were the first couple ever there to apply for joint, equal custody of their children.

“The judge seemed amazed that it was all so amicable and that we had agreed that the children would spend half the time with each of us. It’s worked out very well actually,” she says.

SPLINTER OF ICE

Her ability to write clearly and honestly about sex from a woman’s point of view is still unusual, though becoming less so. Jennifer’s account of her affair with the married academic is a more elegantly written Fatal Attraction but without the demonisation of the female character.

“When I was writing it I hadn’t thought about that analogy but I think it’s true,” she says. “It is, in a way Fatal Attraction from another point of view. And any moral point comes from whatever perspective you are looking from. I could have written it from the man’s point of view and it would have been entirely different.

“I don’t set out to write feminist novels,” she goes on. “But I do write from the point of view of a woman writing at this time about sex. I don’t find it difficult really. I quite like writing about sex – although it makes it difficult when I’m doing readings (smiles).”

“And also the fact that I know my mum’s going to be reading it! But it is a fundamental part of how people relate to each other and it would be dishonest to leave it out. I want it to be, not titillating, but just slightly erotic and quite straightforward.”

Now remarried and with a third child, Glaister teaches creative writing part-time at Hallam University. I ask whether she thinks it is possible to teach anyone to write.

“You can’t teach someone to have a real ear for language,” she says. “But you can teach someone who already has that more about the craft. In other words while you can’t teach anyone to write you can teach those who can already write to write better.”

She says she will continue to write “though I don’t want to spend the rest of my life writing a book a year.”

“I think if I wasn’t writing now I would still think like a writer. There is always a separate part of me that is observing what’s going on. Graham Greene talked about the splinter of ice in the heart of any writer and I remember reading it and thinking ‘how absurd’, but now I can see what he meant.

“Even if something absolutely awful happened this minute, a bit of me would be rubbing its hands together in glee. Even if it was happening to me, part of me would think ‘this is valuable’.”