The first short chapter of The Other Side of You looks so simple. After introducing us to Elizabeth Cruickshank, a suicide patient who ‘in a certain light could have been 14 or 400’, Dr McBride explains how he and his psychiatrist colleagues ‘come alive at a certain kind of raving’. For McBride it is ‘the suicidally disposed who beckoned’. Then he tells us matter-of-factly how, when he was five, he saw his older brother run over by a reversing lorry, and of the loss that has weighed on him ever since. In these five pages Vickers discreetly and with immense skill establishes her narrator and sets out her primary theme.
Perhaps because the author is herself professionally familiar with her subject matter, there is an ease to the narrative voice. Novelists often fall into the trap of providing too much technical jargon when their narrator belongs to a particular profession, so that readers are liable to be very conscious of having a construct foisted on them.
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