Book reviews: The Lamb by Lucy Rose | Old Soul by Susan Barker

Lucy Rose | Orion Books

There is a clear affinity between the gothic genre and feminist writing, albeit a complex one. Writers such as Daphne du Maurier, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, the under-rated Anna Kavan and Sara Maitland use the form for psychologically astute and genuinely creepy ends; Angela Carter must be nauseous and exhausted at her name being taken in vain. This runs concurrently with a more satirical impulse, the kind lampooned in Catherine Morland’s enthusiasms in Northanger Abbey or Ada Doom’s unseen “something nasty in the woodshed” in the sublime Cold Comfort Farm. The pendulum seems far from Austen and Gibbons at present.

Lucy Rose’s The Lamb comes festooned with praise, and the language – “I ate it all up”, it will “devour you whole” and “consume you” – ought to sound the alarums. If you can “get” the book in some “see what I did there” puns, it might not be terribly substantial. Margot lives with her mother, Ruth, and they take in Eden, intending the “stray” to be another cannibalistic meal: instead she becomes a co-conspirator, providing erotic desire that supplants hardscrabble filial love. Father is absent: you don’t need to be Mycroft Holmes to deduce where he is. I have nothing against the topic – Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is profound, Shalom Auslander’s Mother For Dinner is chokingly funny – but this misfires at every turn. Given it has a realist setting, its flaws cannot be excused as chthonic or archetypal.

Given that they are anthropophagi, it is understandable that Ruth shuns society even though her daughter goes to school (where the staff seem pretty bad at safeguarding). Yet she has an ample supply of red wine. Eden makes paper and they use ash for charcoal, but there evidently wasn’t a stationer next door to the off-licence. And how do they pay for things? One hook is that someone has put dead rabbits on the coat-pegs in the school: again, it hardly comes as a surprise when we get the confession.

Another surprise is a technical point that might count as a spoiler. Condition of narration is extremely important, and it is usually taught like this. A person falls asleep in company and dreams they are in the French Revolution. Someone wakes them by tapping them on the neck and they dream their turn has come at the guillotine. It frightens them so much they have a heart attack and die. What’s wrong with this story? Rose completely mishandles first person condition of narration, and although the narrative from beyond the grave has been done in works like The Lovely Bones and My Name is Red, you have to be as good as Alice Sebold or Orhan Pamuk to make it work. It also stubs the reader against its artificiality: why are all the previous meals not there as disembodied consciousnesses? Such stumbling blocks mount up.

I am no expert, but dead bodies tend to have a lot of excrement left in the intestines: what happens to the viscera here? What do they do with the eyeballs? Stock or hors d’oeuvre? Why the obsession with freckles? You would need serious equipment to bone a human carcass properly. They might live in a forest, but the remains are buried so shallowly any badger or fox would have them strewn around. What is not incompetent is derivative. Margot’s hexes might as well be stamped “copyright Shirley Jackson”.

It is infuriating that the book shows little awareness of works like Julie Kristeva’s The Powers of Horror, especially her analysis of abjection, and particularly as this deals with the “immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be”.

A child is exceptional in that the normal reflex reaction to things being disjected from the body – faeces, vomit, mucus, phlegm, blood – is disgust. Even the scene here with menarche skirts abjection. The idea of consuming is aligned with transcending and incorporating, in an animist fashion and given the narratives – Ruth’s rootedness and loveless marriage, Eden’s claim to have given up her child and free-spirited travel – a diagnosis, rather than a critique, of the novel might be a millennial revenge fantasy against first and second wave feminism.

Susan Barker | Tom Barker

Susan Barker provides one of the puffs for The Lamb. She is a far more serious writer, but Old Soul is not a patch on The Incarnations.

At an airport – a classic liminal space – two strangers realise there are arcane similarities in the death of loved ones, in particular a beguiling woman who photographed them. One of them embarks on a quest to find more victims, which stretches back longer than possible.

This is very reminiscent of Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls, which I think a masterpiece, but the mythology here is less honed. In part, the plot going between Puritan Wales, Communist East Germany, a sculptor in the American mesa, a Japanese buto performer and hilariously bad punk bands seems like a fancy costume parade rather than intrinsically necessary detail. The final flourish looks like a twist but is actually a cocked snook at the reader wanting explanation or consquence. Ironically, the novel is as vampiric as its monster, draining exoticism to pep up a hackneyed story.

I rather fear that this will become a refrain this year, but for goodness’ sake, can’t we have some serious writing?

The Lamb, by Lucy Rose, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99

Old Soul, by Susan Barker, Fig Tree, £16.99