Already a subscriber? Log in
This is a writer who does not waste words. The spareness of her style, full of indirect speech and with abrupt shifts of loyalty and mood, mimics the thoughts of young women perfectly. The three novels are each narrated by a different sister: that their voices are barely distinguishable does not matter at all.
Of the three, the central novel, Unicorn Sisters, is the best.The second world war has broken out and the girls’ home is to be taken over by the army; their mother, an aspirant actress, plans to travel, entertaining the troops. The sisters are sent to a small provincial boarding school run by a pair of elderly spinsters. Their monster of a mother says: ‘You’ll miss me, darlings, I know you will’.
Our uniform was only to be obtained from Liberty’s. Imagine, darlings. And we must be fitted with gas masks, too … ‘We must all make sacrifices for our country,’ Mamma said, looking dreamily at her rings.
The nearly 12-year-old Bonnie is unconvinced: ‘We had never mixed with anyone, let alone children.’
When a group of wild girls, evacuated from Clerkenwell, come to lodge at the school, chaos ensues. Lessons stop, values (and the class system) break down. One of the spinsters dies, more or less of grief. In Holden’s world, sex is as upsetting as sudden death and no less random and mysterious. After Bonnie sees two of the older girls in bed with boys, the pet mice she was taking care of are horribly killed: it is the end of innocence.
Holden’s chief subject is betrayal, both big and small. Children betray one another all the time, sometimes wounding each other terribly, more often not. The betrayals inflicted upon them by adults are less easy to forgive and cause more lasting damage. At the beginning of this series it looks as if the story will be about dancing classes and girls with curls: by the end there has been abandonment, abortion and many deaths; some of them directly caused by the cruelty or neglect of the protagonists.
The worst villain is the mother, whose careless unkindness is brilliantly realised. When Bonnie learns that there is something called dry rot in the cellar of the childhood home, she wonders: ‘Perhaps Mamma had dry rot of the heart.’ Later, when the children run away to find their way back to her, the mother’s displeasure registers: ‘Her face was like a cracked dish.’ If these three novels are anything to go by, Ursula Holden’s work is due a
renaissance.
Also in Book Reviews
Also by Cressida Connolly
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in