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| Frances Leviston |
BOOKS OF THE YEAR
The Voice in My Ear — ten stories of modern life
Poet Frances Leviston’s fiction debut is a stunning exercise in perceptivity
Mia Levinton
March 13, 2020
Truth be told, I was wary of a short-story collection by a poet, the two disciplines being as different from one another as photography and film-making. But colour me corrected: Frances Leviston’s debut work of fiction positively knocked my socks off. Each of the 10 stories in The Voice in My Ear is about a different woman called Claire — an apt appellation for characters illuminating aspects of modern life.
“Broderie Anglaise”, which was shortlisted for the 2015 BBC Short Story Award, explores the relationship between a “boomerang kid” and her mother. Living at home after three years away, Claire sets out to sew a dress in secret to wear to her cousin’s wedding. She fantasises about upstaging the bride, choosing fabric in a pale blue that “would make any off-whites or creams placed beside it look like old dentures in a water glass”.
Claire’s mother hovers at the threshold of her childhood bedroom, offering care but thwarting her daughter’s efforts to fashion a new self. Eventually Claire has to ask for help with the dress, and her endeavours at independence unravel in an hour as her mother unstitches her handiwork and decides to “let the seams out after all”.
“Patience” tells the story of a “synthetic” — a care robot hired to look after another Claire’s mother while she goes to Holland on a fellowship. “Is it common behaviour to abandon your elderly mother to a machine?” her mother asks the robot, fittingly named Patience. “ ‘Actually,’ says Patience, ‘it is.’ ”
‘Claire’ is an apt appellation for characters who illuminate different aspects of modern life
Claire, a librarian, has been caring for her narcissistic mother “for a long time now, at least twelve years”, shelving her dreams of a PhD. Her brother is unavailable to help as he does something “very, very important” for a bank in Hong Kong. After a fling with an American academic, Claire returns to her duties at home, only to find that her mother prefers the surrogate carer. To give the illusion of veracity, Patience had arrived with a suitcase — empty not only of personal effects but of emotional baggage.
“Isn’t it a bit hackneyed to talk about mothers?” asks librarian Claire of a woman playing a therapist in a museum installation. In this collection, it’s not hackneyed at all: Leviston renders the rapports much more multi-faceted than the “monstrous mothers” suggested on the book’s front flap. A mother of four whose prodigal daughter is returning for Christmas asks herself: “When would they finally be old enough to see them at last . . . When would she know if she liked her daughter?”
While some parents are overly protective, others are not protective enough. One Claire returns to the Greek hotel where her friend was sexually assaulted at 15 while they were on holiday with her friend’s permissive parents. The “voice in my ear” of the title comes from the earpiece of a Claire botching her big break on TV as she reports on the suicide of a teenager who had been involved with a teacher. The voice from the mother ship urges Claire to get back on topic as she berates the head of a parents’ association, saying that parents should do more to safeguard their children against teacher abuse.
The pièce de résistance is the final story, “No Two Were E’er Wed”, which deftly depicts the power dynamics of a relationship between two young academics in the woke era. Claire’s boyfriend, David, discovers more than he bargained for about her sexual history when he starts reading her diary. He applies a scholarly eye to the entries — analysing her use of the word “nail”, for example — and muses on Claire’s professed interest in submission: “Who exactly was consenting? Was it the submissive woman’s real self, or was it — as in Claire’s case — a false self she had constructed in order to gain approval . . . ?”
The couple wrestle for control, passive-aggressively asking each other about progress on their research, but the crux of the power struggle plays out in the bedroom: “Even with all the respecting he had done, even with all the work, their sex life was still a disaster.” The two months they haven’t been intimate turn into five as David becomes the one withholding sex, and his fantasies grow increasingly contemptuous.
“Poetry is the kind of writing I’ve found that for me most closely approaches the condition of reality,” Leviston once said in an interview. Fortunately for short story aficionados, she has triumphantly succeeded in turning a poetic perceptivity to the form.
The Voice in My Ear, by Frances Leviston, Jonathan Cape, RRP£16.99, 272 pages
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