Alone with her father’s dead body, Olive Piper says, ‘I don’t know anything, except what I feel, and how can anyone know more?’ In Susan Hill’s new novel, Olive’s acceptance of the primacy of feeling represents a coming of age. Her maturity is achieved at a cost.
As in a number of her recent novels — Black Sheep and A Kind Man — Hill explores with great economy an idea of the ubiquity of differentness. Olive, her very name suggestive of something drab and unobtrusive, is a girl of conventional background: in appearance and, apparently, outlook and ability, she is unremarkable. Her life seems predestined for ordinariness. As a schoolgirl she accepts a career in teaching as ‘inevitable’, though she remains convinced that ‘real life was elsewhere’.
There are moments in Olive’s journey when she nudges close to territory more typical of Anita Brookner’s heroines: an unblinking acceptance of her own limitations and a recognition of the inevitability — and painful fallout — of mishap.
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