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When it comes to attempting suicide, Kolia’s mother is a “repeat offender”. A human rights barrister on the verge of being disbarred, Lalita craves her now adult daughter’s attention with such ferocity that, when denied, she throws herself in the river, lies down in the middle of the road or drinks cleaning fluid. “She tells me that it’s my fault,” says Kolia, now in her 20s and tutoring posh kids in London while hoping to go to art college. “She only did it because I wasn’t talking to her.”
Kolia left her mother’s home long ago, “because there were often smashed plates … clothes being cut up or wrists being grabbed or pulled”. But Lalita’s two young sons from a second marriage are still at the mercy of their mother’s chaotic parenting, which is at best inappropriate, at worst abusive or downright cruel. As a young teen, Kolia once complained that her chest was too small; her mother showed her a photograph of a woman whose breasts had been cut off by soldiers.
The fact that Lalita can apparently also be charming and “hypnotic”, with a “wild and flashing” soul and plenty of “passion”, made it hard for me – and, I’m sure, any reader – to shake the suspicion that she must be suffering from some sort of mental illness, if not mania. But here’s where things turn perplexing: though there’s one brief reference to “this kind of bi-polar parenting”, it’s hard to know whether the author means for us to take it literally. And though I don’t generally take much notice of how a novel is described on its cover, it did begin to bother me that this one is billed as a “painful love letter to childishness, innocence and imagination”. A love letter? Really? Am I missing something?
Still, Lewis’s writing is likably feisty and alive, full of verve and pizzazz, packed with crunchy observation and a wry kind of energy, even if it occasionally flounders under the weight of too much detail. Though every situation and character is astutely and convincingly drawn – Kolia’s toothless and doggedly unloving, orphanage-running grandmother is particularly memorable – it becomes a problem that by more than two-thirds of the way through, most of what’s happening is still firmly lodged in the past. Put simply, there’s a limit to how many flashbacks a reader can take. You begin to long to be catapulted into a present where things are changing, where people have to make choices, where something – anything – is at stake.
Another small gripe is that now and then the novel seems to undermine itself in mystifying ways. Lalita has tormented her boys and repeatedly lied about it, and yet we’re told that “Kolia’s honestly not sure who to believe: her baffling adult mother or two children” – surely an observation that makes no sense coming from someone who as a teenager fled her mother’s house to live with her father?
I’m not a wholly unbiased reader: though nothing like as vicious or dramatic, there are painful reminders here of my relationship with my own mother. I was left both stirred up and also feeling that what Lewis has delivered is no “love letter”, but something far more interesting: a meditation on the annihilation of self, of that particular and terrible damage wreaked by narcissistic or mentally unwell parents on their offspring. Far from having much to do with childish “innocence” or “imagination”, this is surely a cry of pure rage, of fury and powerlessness. Or it should be. Possibly the moment that rang truest of all was the one where Kolia, wandering unmoored through her childhood home, is reduced to feeling that “she’s not even a girl, just something angry and small, trying to make sense of her mother’s actions”.
