This is a bookclub book. By the time you read this we’ll have discussed it and I’ll be able to put the book aside. I do love bookclubs, I’ve learned to appreciate books far more than I used to. I may not necessarily like them but I appreciate them.
This is the story of Tessa, born a Scouse, in Liverpool. Her mother is a cleaner and her older brother has done time for something he didn’t do and is now targetted by police. She has risen totally above all of this and has managed to become a barrister after getting a scholarship to Cambridge. Tessa has managed to change her accent and her looks so that she’s more acceptable in the law world. And then she goes through an experience that one in three women experience, she is raped, by a colleague. She then has to decide whether to report this to the police and then whether to follow through with the whole court experience. She knows from the barrister side how things work, but it’s very different when you’re the victim, when you’re the only witness, and when it’s a case of ‘he said, she said’.
We are given some insight into the class system here. How a Scouse shouldn’t bother to aspire to be a lawyer, yet alone a barrister. After she moves chambers we’re shown how she doesn’t have enough furniture to fill the space and we’re told how what she has now is more space than she’s ever had to herself ever. I’m not sure the people she’s talking to understand that point. If you’ve been brought up with lots of room, lots of money and horses, it’s hard to understand someone who only has friends and no room, money or even a pony. And we see it from her point of view, she has trouble accommodating her mind to having more money than she’s ever had and doesn’t quite manage to live in bigger spaces, although she does buy more expensive clothing on occasion.
Miller makes it quite clear how the time drags when you’re anticipating something as serious as a court case. When you’re the only witness. When it’s his word against yours. And when society tends to believe the male rather than the female, the rapist rather than the victim. We’re not told that time drags, instead Tessa counts the days since the rape, until the court case.
The affect of this first person book is devastating. Because we’re in Tessa’s head it is hard to look away and be somewhere else. We don’t get a break from her psyche, from her thinking about her work colleagues, about how she doesn’t feel at home with her family, about how she doesn’t really have many friends, about how different she is to the rest of the barristers. And then her feelings about the rape, about reporting it, about how other people react when her rapist is arrested, and then about how she doesn’t know who are her real friends, who can she really trust to help her through all the morass of being a witness in court. I’ve found it a real challenge to navigate real life during the few days it took me to read this book. I’m hoping that the discussion in bookclub is more of a debrief than anything and I can get back to my life.
What I really don’t like about this book is the style. There are no quotation marks except for quotes that are inside a dialogue paragraph. The dialogues are separated by paragraph marks from the inner monologues. And the dialogues are also indented further than the first line of each paragraph. I happened to mention that to one of my bookclub members and she hadn’t noticed that. I’m not sure what that says about me because I did, or her because she didn’t.
Edit: One of my book club is a lawyer. She told us all that the lack of quotation marks and further indentation of the dialogue is a lawyer thing. End edit.
I did find the book compelling. The writing style is easy, it was just everything else I’ve notated that made it a hard book to read. I did struggle to put it down some nights otherwise, based on the content, I reckon it would have taken me far more than the five days.