Rating: 5/5
Review:
Enjoyable, humane and insightful
I thought Three Things About Elsie was excellent. It is involving, humane and extremely well
written.
This is the story of Florence Claybourne who is in her
eighties, living in sheltered accommodation and her memory and other mental
faculties are now pretty unreliable. A
man who supposedly drowned sixty years before arrives, creating a mystery and
sense of menace which drives the plot of the book.
We get the story from three intercut points of view; Florence's
unreliable first-person narrative and two third-person narratives from the
points of view of two members of staff - Miss Ambrose, a supervisor and the
handyman, Handy Simon. It is extremely
well done and has plenty to say about age, memory, attitudes to older people
and so on, but it is Florence's
voice which really stands out. At times
there are some strong echoes of Alan Bennett's A Cream Cracker Under The Settee,
but for the most part Florence is an original and very engaging character with
her own slightly eccentric but often profound take on things. I marked lots of sentences and passages which
I liked; these two brief extracts may give you a flavour:
"Elsie's father left for the war and came back as a
telegram on the mantelpiece," and "I looked across the lounge and
into the past. It was more useful than
the present. There were times when the
present felt so unimportant, so unnecessary.
Just somewhere I had to dip into from time to time, out of
politeness."
I became involved in the mysterious plot, but it is the
beautifully drawn characters, the book's humanity and insight, and Joanna
Cannon's excellent writing which really counted for me. I thought it all added up to an excellent
book, which I can recommend very warmly.
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