Salley Vickers - Grandmothers

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Not one of Vickers' best

I enjoyed Grandmothers, but I did have reservations.

Salley Vickers tells the story of three quite different characters who are grandmothers (strictly, two are grandmothers and one is a good friend who fulfils the role) who don’t know each other at the beginning of the book. They each have a close relationship with and often take care of one grandchild, and their stories develop over one year, during which they overlap and interact. Vickers uses this structure to explore those relationships, to examine their effect on and importance to both the grandmothers and the children and to give her views on a variety of topics, some neatly, some rather clumsily.

Vickers, as always, paints intimate and compassionate portraits of her subjects, both adult and child. They are strong, thoughtful and insightful pictures by and large. (The men are peripheral and largely act as cyphers for male failings, but this is a book about the women and the children they relate to and the focus is rightly on them). She writes very well, of course, and I found the book an easy and quite involving read much of the time, but there was a lot of familiar ground: slightly lost women finding fulfilment and new delight in life, the significance of art, especially religious art and angels, the importance of great religious buildings and so on don’t have quite the freshness and emotional impact they did when I first read Miss Garnet’s Angel and The Cleaner of Chartres, for example. There is quite a lot of quotation and cultural reference which I felt verged on showing off, and I found the ending, which is intended to be moving, rather sentimental and twee. Vickers also goes a bit over the top in her prose occasionally. For example, a character is reminiscing while boarding a train:

“Her mind arabesqued – as she begged the man whose aisle seat was next to the window seat that her ticket proclaimed hers to excuse her – to how they had dined...” That’s a bit rich for me, and although it only happened a few times, I think Salley Vickers is better than that.

Overall, this is a recommendable read, but in spite of some very good things about it, I don’t think it’s one of Salley Vickers’ best. 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.

(My thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley.)