At a recent U3A session that I go to about poetry, prose and plays, someone read a poem by Helen Dunmore. I hadn’t thought about this author for a long time but I knew I had book of her poetry. I found it, enjoyed dipping into it and realised there was a poem at the back, on one of the endpapers, that she had written just a couple of weeks before she died in 2017. It was very poignant and I decided to look up Helen Dunmore and find out more.
What I don’t think I had known was that she was a novelist as well as a poet. I decided to read the last book she had written: Birdcage Walk.
We are in revolutionary times; the latter part of the 18th century and the guillotine is slicing its way through aristocratic necks in Paris. There was of course fear that there would be revolt and revolution in England and that the monarchy would fall in a similar way. Although this never came to pass, there was war and inevitably fear that the economy would crash.
The story plays out in Bristol which was having a building boom in the second half of the 1700s. Our heroine, Lizzie Fawkes is the child of the radical pamphlet writer Julia Fawkes. This is a household full of idealism, where the French Revolution is followed eagerly at every step. Ill-advisedly Lizzie marries John Diner Tredevant who is a reckless property developer, far too heavily invested in risky building projects. From the start the reader does not trust Tredevant but you are unsure how dark the situation will become. This book is indeed a thriller, a psychological one.
I was reminded of Mary Wollstonecraft at several points in this story. Lizzie should have been taking off for Paris to witness history being made rather than trying and often failing to please her unreliable and increasingly threatening husband.
A great read. I’m going to search out her book ‘Zennor in Darkness’ next.