Claire Fuller - Swimming Lessons

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Engaging and very rewarding

I thought this was very good indeed.  I enjoyed Our Endless Numbered Days very much; if anything, Swimming Lessons is better.

This is a novel of character.  The plot doesn't sound all that much: Flora's mother went missing when Flora was 10 years old, and interspersed with Flora's story are letters written by her mother Ingrid, and left randomly in her father's book collection telling the story of her, shall we say, chequered relationship with Gil, Flora's father.  Now she returns to her seaside childhood home where her father has had an accident and is being looked after by her older sister.  What emerges – beautifully – is the effect on all the family of Gil's infidelities and unreliability, and their response to the uncertainty of what happened to Ingrid.

It's really well done.  Claire Fuller writes excellent, clean prose, she creates vivid and completely believable characters whose decencies and flaws are very real and she has a lot of important things to say about the nature of family, of trust and of finding who we really are.  There is also some lovely stuff about reading, books and the importance of the reader among other things, and it's all done with a lovely, straightforward but delicate touch.  Look for the subtle way Fuller uses the floorboard in front of the stove that creaks, for example; it's not important to the plot and is almost invisible, but it is unshowy detail like this which makes the whole thing so intricately rich and believable.  Here are also some great lines, like Ingrid responding to the classic philanderer's "It doesn't mean anything," with "It means something to me!"  Or this little passage when Flora discovers a bookplate in an edition of Moby-Dick: " ' This book belongs to,' Flora read out, 'Sarah Sims.'  The writing was laboured, the pen scoring the paper, and she imagined a young girl, hard-working, her tongue sticking out in concentration.  Under her name, Sarah had added, 'But I don't want it.' "  I loved that - and lots more. 

I found Swimming Lessons involving, readable and very rewarding and I can recommend it very warmly.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)