Book review: Meredith, Alone, by Claire Alexander

Meredith has not left her home for 1,214 days. She writes in the first person, giving a day to day account of her life, interspersed with flashbacks to childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. This is a suspense novel, but an unusual one. The question is whether she will ever venture forth again, and if so, why and when?

The title is a little misleading. Meredith does indeed live by herself, but she is not alone all the time. She has a friend, Sadie, who visits, bringing her small children with her, and a sister Fiona who does so also. Then, early in the story, she is visited by a young man, Tom, who who works for a befriending charity called “Holding Hands”. She admits him and gives him tea and biscuits, and before long they are doing a jigsaw together; she loves jigsaws, and calls herself “Jigsaw Girl” on the internet. She earns a living in her isolation, writing copy (or content) for websites. She has a cat called Fred, uses the internet for shopping, and has a number of online friends. Early in the novel she finds a new one, Celeste, with whom she is quick to bond. In short, she has a well-organized life and finds it quite satisfying. She is alone but not lonely.

How did she come to live like this? What sort of breakdown has she suffered? How secure is her apparent self-sufficiency? These questions present themselves early. Answers, or at least suggestions of an answer, are offered early in flashbacks to childhood. “’Why’, she asks her sister in 1993, aged 14, “don’t we have any photographs of us as babies?” Then, when she has her first serious boyfriend, she reflects: “spending time with his family had made me look closer at my own. Normal was chatting at the breakfast table. Normal was telling the truth, even when it hurt. Normal was family pictures.”

What wasn’t normal, or what she would like to think of as normal, was the girls’ relationship with their mother. “Mama” as, perhaps surprisingly, they called her, wasn’t normal. Their father was absent, though it’s unclear almost to the end of the novel whether he had chosen to leave his wife and daughters or been driven away. Mama is difficult. She seems to dislike them. They’re a burden, a chain on her social life. A drinker, smoker and manhunter, she comes to seem to the girls to be a slut. She is certainly an embarrassment. One can see why in adult life Meredith has chosen withdrawal and adopted a way of life in which she can, as she believes, control everything. so long as she doesn’t step through the front door.

The story is a strong one. It is set in Glasgow, though it might be anywhere, and this is not what one may think of as a Glasgow novel. Certainly there’s no strong sense of the city, as Meredith tries to blot out the world beyond her front door.

It is a novel in a classic tradition, the theme the moral education of the heroine who is to be brought to a truer understanding of herself and the society she belongs to. Jane Austen’s heroines have to learn to prepare themselves for the right husband, the right marriage. Here, Meredith has to learn what she has tried to deny: how to live in the social world. In order to learn this she has to confront the past, to accept that to leave behind the barriers she has constructed, she must be willing to risk being hurt.

This is an engaging novel, written in clear, unpretentious prose, with no tiresome showing-off. Meredith in her chosen isolation is surprisingly credible, and Claire Alexander writes of her sympathetically, but without sentimentality. After all, in her hermitage Meredith is happy to accept the help of her sister and her friend without giving anything in return. She is at first almost wholly self-concerned. She learns in time that it is as important, even more important, to give than to take. I opened this book without enthusiasm, but I read it with increasing pleasure.

Meredith, Alone, by Claire Alexander, Michael Joseph, 415pp, £14.99