Sofka Zinovieff - Putney

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Readable and insightful
 

I thought Putney was an excellently written book with a lot of very good things about it.  Ralph, a successful composer his late 20s becomes obsessed with Daphne, the 9-year-old daughter of his friend in a shambolic, bohemian early-1970s household.  This eventually develops into a sexual affair between them when Daphne is around 13.  Putney is therefore a story of grooming and child sexual abuse, which has now been so often used as a plot driver in books, sometimes lazily and exploitatively, that I am always very suspicious of it in a novel.  However, Sofka Zinovieff tackles a difficult subject with clarity, insight and thoughtfulness, and many things about the book are excellent. 

The narrative is from three points of view, those of Ralph, Daphne and her friend Jane and often in the form of memories recalled in the present day – again something which is very fashionable and could be very annoying, but Zinovieff writes so well and with such control that it works excellently.  In the first half of the book she generates a sense of the "affair" as it seemed to the two of them at the time, with Ralph's self-deluding justifications and Daphne's naïve excitement and adolescent love for him.  Around half way through there is a very clever change in tone about half way as it begins to be seen through clearer, adult eyes and the consequences begin to be revealed. 

It is convincing and disturbing.  I think Zinovieff is very insightful about the whole thing and sheds real light on historical sex abuse as a whole, including the often confused emotions of those involved and the responses of those affected by the revelations.  The prose is wonderfully evocative and readable and she creates utterly convincing characters, sense of place and atmosphere.  I did have some reservations: the first section was rather too long, so that I got bogged down a bit, and the ending had rather too much reliance on coincidence and a slightly sentimental conclusion which didn't really match the clear-eyed reality of most of the book.  Nonetheless, Putney is both an important and thoroughly readable book, which I can recommend.