required reading

Maggie O'Farrell drew on her own experiences for her 2005 prizewinner The Distance Between Us. The prize in question is the Somerset Maugham award, presented by the Society of Authors, and the experiences are a sojourn in Hong Kong, and missing a year of school because of a viral infection. O'Farrell neatly divides these two life events between the two strands of the story she tells in The Distance Between Us. The first strand is that of Stella and Nina, close sisters who share a fierce bond, intensified by events of their childhood that involve a viral illness. And the second strand belongs to Jake, a Westerner who has grown up in Hong Kong, and who returns to his home country under strange circumstances.

The Distance Between Us is a story about psychological and emotional distance: you might guess this from the title without too much difficulty. The distances invoked are geographical: between Hong Kong and Great Britain, between Great Britain and New Zealand, between Scotland and London. The characters spend plenty of time on the phone, calling long distance; it's one of the little motifs of the book. And, unsurprisingly, the distance is also a psychological gap. The front cover of my edition hints at this: two girls standing side by side, almost touching, dressed alike, represent the closeness of Nina and Stella. I never had a sister (though I pleaded for one), but O'Farrell does a great job of evoking the almost claustrophobic intensity of this sibling relationship; when thinking about the book I often misremember the pair as twins. Nina depends upon Stella, unusually for an older sibling, phoning her two or three times a day. But she also knows her thoroughly and intimately.

O'Farrell also portrays the emotional distance between Jake and his partner Mel, neatly conjuring the awkwardness and painfulness of their relationship, which seems to have come to a dead stop in the water.

And the final distance is that between Stella and Jake. Their lives aren't in any way 'parallel', as the book jacket had me believe, unless we all live lives that are parallel to the lives of other human beings, but they do converge in a way that seems unlikely from the first few pages of the novel, but is soon pretty predictable.

Both the pairing of Nina and Stella, and Jack and Nina niggled at me as I put the book down for the last time. I had not seen any evidence of mutual understanding between Jack and Stella; their relationship seemed to be formed from a coup de foudre, and ended in a way fit for a Hollywood romance. Stella is, at once point in the story, presented with a choice between Nina and a college boyfriend. But at no point does the author address the uneasy question of whether either Stella or Nina could suffer any relationship to be closer than their sisterly one. The obvious denouement of Jack ending up with Stella in his arms (there, I've said it, but it won't have come as a surprise to you) is rather unsatisfactory, when you look at it in these terms. Their relationship threatens never to be as close or to have the primacy of Nina and Stella's, but the author never explores whether this is problematic.

I've touched on the implausibilty of the Hollywood ending of the novel. In fact the whole novel reads like a cinematic experience:

Nina places the phone on the floor next to her and dials the code for London, then the number. There is a short pause before the pulsing purr of a distant ringing.

She waits, frowning, picking apart one of the sandwiches Richard made for her that morning, extracting the silvery half moons of onion. He knows she doesn't eat raw onion. Then there's the gasp of electronic ether before the hiss of a voicemail recording: Hi, you've reached Stella Gilmore in Production. I'm either away from my desk or on another-

O'Farrell's style is so clear that the extract above allows me to visualize what is going on absolutely perfectly. But I found it more than a little mundane: one stage direction* follows another. And when I am given more information ('He knows she doesn't eat raw onion') it seems to be superfluous. Richard making Nina sandwiches that Nina feels the need to pick apart tells me enough about their relationship without needing to be told that she knows that he knows that she doesn't like onion. Perhaps I'm being picky here, but flicking through the pages confirms the truth of this observation - O'Farrell is clear to the point of absolute bordedom. I don't think I've ever come across a sentence in literary fiction quite so banal as this one:

The noise of the street rises, as if someone's turned up the volume.

But the greatest crime comes with the 'dizzying twist' (Daily Mail) at the end of the novel. It is clear that the novel is leading up to a revelation of some great proportion. By page 8 we know that some event of massive significance has happened in Stella's life. But when the revelation arrived, I found that it did not shock me at all. O'Farrell took the coward's route, shying away from allowing her heroine to be at all culpable for what occurs, and exaggerating the class bully, who is an instrumental character in the ending, to unbelievable proportions of inhumanity in order to achieve this. Emblazoned on the back cover of the book is a quote from Amanda Craig, in The Times, who says that O'Farrell is 'really remarkable among modern novelists' in making us 'care passionately about her characters and their fates'. This certainly wasn't true for me. And I got the impression that the only thing O'Farrell cared about was sewing up a neat, romantic, unthreatening story for the Hollywood producers to option.

(*Thanks, Ang!)