A Woman on the Edge of Time. By Jeremy Gavron. Scribe. $26.95.
Reviewer: Marion Halligan
London, the 1960s. A beautiful young woman, mother of two children, seals up the kitchen, puts her head in the gas oven, turns it on, kills herself. She has just finished a book for publication.
No, she is not Sylvia Plath, though it is only a couple of years since she did much the same thing. She is Hannah Gavron. The book is soon published as The Captive Wife, a sociological study of women trapped in marriages. Why would she commit such a terrible act, when her life seemed to have so many good things in it?
Her son, one of the two little boys she left behind when she killed herself, wants to know the answer to this question, and this book is an exploration of the possibilities. Its subtitle is A Son's Search for his Mother, which did not engage me at first, since the trope of sons searching for mothers is about as common as that of daughters looking for fathers. But very quickly I was seduced. Jeremy Gavron has worked as a journalist and written novels; he knows how to construct a book, how to make his subject as interesting as it deserves to be. It is a forensic work; he has to start off from a position of almost complete ignorance. She is his mother, but almost entirely unknown, and his history is "full of great unsaids". "It is 'the way we do things in our family' … Keep secrets, evade the truths we do not want to be true." He says this in the context of a family member who had bowel cancer, went into hospital for an operation, which was successful, then a few days later took the gun she had smuggled into hospital and shot herself. But it was years before this was generally known.
Gavron talks to everybody he can find: relations, friends, acquaintances. He finds a constant disjunct between his imaginings of various situations and their discovered realities. He documents conversations. He also puts in letters the schoolgirl Hannah wrote to her friends. The book is a handsome hardback on thick and furry paper, with a great many photographs. These are black and white, on the same furry paper, so they are smudgy, unclear; you have to peer at them and try to see what they really are, just as Gavron has to peer at his mother and work out what was really going on.
It's a book about women in the world, then and now, and how they live their lives. He discovers that her friends had to find their own compromises, which were more or less successful. One of them says, "She had no sense of deferring to authority … To succeed in those days, women had to give up something – children, work, femininity – whereas Hannah wanted and appeared to have everything." And yet, clearly, this was appearance only; it was not how she felt.
Gavron goes to feminist texts in his desire to understand. He reads Elaine Showalter, Meredith Tax, Kate Millett. He quotes an article by Susan Faludi written shortly after the death of Shulamith Firestone, who "helped to create a new society. But she couldn't live in it." The article considers the "whole generation" of founding American feminists, how so many of them were "unable to thrive in the world they had done so much to create".
Hannah's is a sad story, of waste and despair. And of guilt. Her father says: "I had a wonderful daughter, and did not take proper care." Gavron has his theories, more than I have gone into here, for instance the state of her marriage, and the dereliction of her lover. He spreads these theories out for us, and comes to the conclusion that what is needed is a narrative verdict, not available to Hannah since the concept wasn't introduced into courts until 2004, and even if it had been it would not have been appropriate to a coronial court considering suicide. But he offers in some pages at the end of the book his "attempt to fathom what Hannah's coroner described as 'a state of mind we cannot know' ".
Gavron is aware that he is possibly the least qualified person to write about Hannah, since he has no memories of her. But he is of her blood, and that is important. This book is an act of piety, a memorial and a tribute to a mother who found life too difficult to continue with. He writes it for himself, and for his children, who are also of her blood. It is certainly a record of failure, of waste, but also of great love, and that is what moves us.
Marion Halligan's latest novel, Goodbye Sweetheart, is published by Allen & Unwin.
