33—MARYLEBONE JOURNAL
CULTURE
Grace Williams Says It Loud by Emma Henderson Sceptre, £19.99
Grace Williams, born in 1947, is “spastic” and the victim of polio. Consigned at the age of 11 to the Briar Mental Institute with “mangled face”, useless arm, club foot and the confused conviction of her own imperfection, she doesn’t see the world like other people. On her first day, however, she meets Daniel Smith: an epileptic with no arms who types with his feet, talks like Oscar Wilde, and doesn’t see the world like other people either. Despite deaths, accidents and separation, there blossoms between the two a passionate and touching love affair, all the more moving
The Lessons by Naomi Alderman Penguin, £12.99
The Lessons is an Oxford novel – a love letter in poison pen, a poignant tribute to oak panelling, the hedonistic glory of golden youth and biting satire. Its narrator James Scaife begins his undergraduacy a typical high-achiever – only to have dreams of scholarship and running Blue shattered by a fall on the ice. As he recovers, that quintessential Oxbridge combination of continual pressure, neurotic contemporaries and tutors who respond to imperfection with accusations of bringing the good name of the college into disrepute leaves him struggling. When he meets the soothing and sympathetic Jess, however, he is soon drawn into her close circle of friends – studious Franny, political Simon, inscrutable Emanuella and the novel’s antihero, beautiful, unstable, fabulously wealthy Mark. For a time, the house and luxurious
lifestyle they share – Mark’s eager gift to the group – seems an oasis, its crumbling Georgian splendour and lavish indulgence in keeping with the dreaming spires and golden stone surrounding them. Yet as they leave Oxford and try to wend their separate ways through the maze of the real world, the threads of memory keep drawing them
for the odds stacked against them – their confinement, the disdain and disgust of doctors who dismiss them as “ghastly, animal, monstrous”, the imposition of violent and degrading punishments (the scene where Grace “licks the shit from the nurses’ toilet” is a particular horror). Nevertheless their relationship moves
deftly from childhood companions to teenage sweethearts to adult lovers with tenderness, the complications of sexuality and closeness under such circumstances delineated with a raw honesty and occasional brutality that reflects both their off-kilter worldviews and the sore reality of their lives. It’s vivid, sometimes painful and frequently disturbing, but at the same time offers powerful testimony to the capacity of the human heart.
back, binding them into a dangerous web of secrecy, passion and betrayal. Poised between Brideshead Revisited
and The Secret History, Alderman swoops seamlessly between sensitive explorations of relationships and sardonic caricatures of the uncaring absurdity of certain universities. Both James’s ostentatious sister (now “Assistant Deputy Vice-chair of an important committee tasked with investigating soya beans”) and university fellows are caricatured with a humour that doesn’t quite disguise his genuine criticism of a world where tutors refuse to help with work missed through injury, but happily bed their charges. That said, Alderman’s evocation of the hazy utopia of remembered youth is powerful enough to counterbalance Mark’s ability to “list for us in alphabetical order all the members of the Bullingdon Club he’d ever snogged”, and prevents the novel from losing its poignancy. Mark’s magnetism is matched only
by his damage. Unimaginably wealthy from birth, echoing Sebastian Flyte in his mysterious sado-masochism, all his relationships have been blighted by his casual assumption of power. In The Lessons the freedom and luxury of great wealth sits right by its destructive and isolating impact – and what begins as a paean to gilded youth becomes a touching exploration of the price of privilege.
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