As soon as I finished Mrs Gaskell & Me by Nell Stevens (my review here), I bought a copy of Bleaker House (2017) – going on rather a wild goose chase through London bookshops in order to do so. It had been on my probably-read-one-day list for a long time, and I thought I should hasten on that time – and it’s really good; excellent pre-Christmas reading.
I wrote in my review of Mrs Gaskell & Me that I much preferred the sections where Stevens was writing about her own life to those about Mrs Gaskell’s – and so I was pleased to see that Bleaker House is all about Stevens’ own writing exploits. Specifically, the fellowship generously given to all students on her writing masters in Boston, whereby they can spend up to three months anywhere in the world. Many of her fellow students are going to Europe or Asia. She decides to go to… Bleaker.
Bleaker is a tiny island (population: 2), part of the Falklands. Off the coast of Argentina, the islands are an overseas British territory (cf the Falklands War) and about as isolated as you can get. The name is a corruption of ‘breaker’, because of the waves that break there, but it does seem an accurate description of the conditions there. Especially in winter, which is when Stevens decides to go. After a sojourn at the slightly-larger Stanley, she stays in one of two otherwise empty guests houses on Bleaker. The farming couple who divide their time between this and another island are there for the beginning and end of her three months, but otherwise she is alone – with her novel.
The idea was to get away from the world so that she’ll have to write her novel – about a man named Ollie who ends up travelling to Bleaker to track down the father he thought had died years earlier. We know, from the outset, that Bleaker House is a work of non-fiction, not a novel – so what went wrong? (Or, perhaps, right?)
This is a challenging read for any of us who are not doing very well at finishing novel, but an extremely engaging and well-written account of failing to write a book. And, of course, about the unusual experience she has foisted upon herself – not least the lack of food she brought, and dealing without the internet. This section is from her stay on Stanley, not noticeably more modernised than Bleaker:
I will spend the next month in this guest house on the outskirts of the town, presided over by Mauru, the housekeeper. Since it is the middle of winter, Maura explains, there will probably be no other guests. The owner of the hotel, Jane, is away in England. For the next few weeks, then, it will just be Mauru and me.
I ask her about the Internet. “Is there Wi-Fi here?” I know, as I ask, that I sound needy, a little obsessed. I am a little obsessed.
She squints.
“Wi-Fi?” I repeat. “The Internet?”
Mauru looks troubled. “The Internet?” Jane would know, she says. She leads me into the hall, and points at a bulky machine squatting on a table by the door. She looks doubtful as she says, “Is that it?”
“No,” I say, “no, that’s a printer.”
“The Internet?” Mauru repeats, again. She shrugs. “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere. I’m just not sure where.”
In both her books, Stevens goes for an interesting patchwork technique – putting together different stages of her life in a way that works really well (and presumably takes a great deal of thought to avoid feeling odd). So we see the relationship she has recently left, and experiences from writing classes, all intersected with the feelings of isolation and uncertainty on the island. In amongst these, perhaps less successfully, are excerpts from the work in progress – and a couple of short stories that aren’t related. Her writing in these is good, though with a little less vitality than her autobiographical writing, but it’s hard to see quite how they cohere with the rest of the book. I suppose it would be a lot shorter without them – and I’d have complained if we didn’t get any evidence of the work she was there to do. All things considered, the balance isn’t too off.
Stevens is an honest, interesting writer – managing the difficult feat of extended introspection without isolating the reader. Who knows how many more books she can write before she runs out of writerly life experiences to document, but I’m hoping there’s a least a few more to come.
It’s interesting reading your review of this book but it’s the kind of book I’d avoid. Books about writers writing or not writing hold little interest for me. Do you think she realised that she was going to write a book about writing while she was on the island? The Wifi episode quoted seemed false to me; why would someone go to such effort to get away from the world and then worry about their internet connection!
Fair enough! Though I can completely empathise with her dual wish to get away from everything and panic when there isn’t any internet…
A book about not writing a book! That’s hilarious.
But I’m with Jonathan: I used to take an interest in the travails of writers, but there has been such a deluge of it that now it bores me. There is nothing new to say about it. Write your damn book, I think when I see a tweet about a blog post they’ve penned about how hard it is, or stop complaining and go and do something else!