Book review - Adventures in dunderland

Published on Thursday 24 July 2008 12:46

AN Edinburgh academic's tale of two Victorian sisters is one of the year's most sparkling debuts

The Peachgrowers' Almanac

by Elaine di Rollo

Chatto and Windus, 344pp, 16.99

IT'S A DEMAND OF THE AGE WE live in that our heroines should be feisty, independent-seeking, assertive women; 150 years ago, the feminine ideal was quite different. Which presents historical fiction writers with a bit of a conundrum: do they reflect the prevailing attitudes of the time, or focus on those individuals who bucked the trend, and in doing so, more closely resembled women today?

In her debut novel, set in 1857, Edinburgh-based academic Elaine di Rollo has chosen to chart the latter course, and produced two very modern twin sisters, Alice and Lilian Talbot, who buck just about every trend going.

And yet their experiences are not without precedent, and that awareness of precedent is what gives di Rollo's remarkable first book its depth. Albeit a 21st-century novel mapped on to mid-19th century lives, this is nevertheless a tale with historical integrity.

The Peachgrowers' Almanac is also beautifully written and an absolute joy to read.

Lilian, the beautiful, vivacious twin, has been sent to India with a new husband, as punishment by her father for some crime that is not immediately revealed. Alice, the plain, intellectual one, has to stay behind and continue her duties helping her father with his impressive collection of bizarre artefacts.

Numerous aunts live with them at the Great House (whose gates were barred immediately after the death of his first son), and various inventors and assorted Victorian oddballs visit the collection from time to time. Dr Cattermole, a perverse and slimy friend of Talbot's, is another visitor, and it is he who recommends the appointment of a young Mr Blake, formerly his assistant, to photograph the Talbot collection.

Meanwhile Lilian is in India, coping with a sickly husband, boring ex-pats and a whole new way of life, without the support of her sister – their father has forbidden contact between them, so the occasional letter that gets through is full of coded words and pictures.

Lilian's husband soon falls sick and dies, however, leaving her to the mercy of Mr Hunter, a former lover who, it emerges, was somehow responsible for her leaving her home in disgrace.

All of this sounds very melodramatic and dark but di Rollo's writing style is full of humour and energy. An awareness of parody lurks beneath the surface but never breaks through to spoil the spell she casts – these twin worlds, in England and in India, are perfectly real, for all their exaggerated fakery and hammy walk-ons.

Di Rollo takes real situations and events – Cattermole, a pornographer and highly dubious surgeon, wants to subject the "unfeminine and far too articulate" Alice to a clitoridectomy, to cure her of her "madness". As extreme as it sounds, there's plenty of evidence to show that by the mid-19th century, some did advocate this procedure to cure women's "hysteria" – their need for independence.

The huge, anarchic collection, as well as the ridiculous experiments of Mr Talbot, are also typical of an age whose emphasis on invention and discovery meant a flip-side of dangerous experimentation and oppression; in addition, the practices of the British in India, and the bloody riots and uprisings that ensued; and the struggle of women in a patriarchal society, all inform her tale. Mr Talbot can give consent to a dangerous operation on one daughter because he owns her and she has nowhere else to go; he can banish another to a loveless marriage and a strange country for the same reason.

That Alice closely resembles Wilkie Collins's plain but clever heroine Marian Halcombe, who would appear in his most famous novel, The Woman in White, just three years after the events of di Rollo's book, and that Lilian recalls those intrepid women explorers of the east we have just begun to learn about, such as Hester Stanhope and Isabella Bird, is no accident: di Rollo has taken those extreme, atypical examples of Victorian womanhood that we can more readily identify with today, and made them her own.

This is one of the most enjoyable, intelligent and genuinely humorous books I've read this year. Given its comic take on serious issues and events, it may well be overlooked when it comes to prize-giving time – comedy doesn't often attract Booker-type nominations.

That's an injustice waiting to happen: Elaine di Rollo's debut should be read, and it should be rewarded, too.