TeaIn the summer of 1976 he called for My Generation of Novelists. We don’t remember it, but we remember the texture of daily life in that era, and the heat wave putting daily life under the kind of pressure that fosters imagination. In Guardian journalist Charlotte Edwardes’s debut novel, Trouble Was, the scene is set by a heat wave that exacerbates water shortages; The growing marital and mental health crisis of a mother of three young children; A remote farm in the western country. Although in some ways the pace is slow – not a criticism, the pace of a school holiday with nowhere to go and nothing to do is also slow – the engines of the novel start from the first page.
Edwards takes the risk of a first-person child narrator, the elementary-aged Frank. Such figures are necessarily precocious – which is why full-length novels by nine-year-olds are rarely written and never published – and demand the suspension of our disbelief, but in this case it’s convincing and compelling from the start. The use of past tense helps, allowing for surprisingly immediate observation and the feeling that the prose is in the steady hands of a remembering adult. Through the contrast between Frank’s and the reader’s understandings, the book reveals what the reader needs to understand about the lives of adults. We know that most adults are also adulterers, that their mothers’ mental illness is hereditary as well as situational, and that their efforts to deny them social services are almost substantial.
We meet Frank and his younger siblings, four-year-old Odette and toddler Patrick, in their mother’s smelly old car, which was “so close that it made my job of taking care of us easier”. They drive through the night to their Aunt Perry’s large farmhouse, leaving the house as many times as before, for reasons Frank never really understands. His father is in the Navy, but Frank’s memories of and longing for him are complex: reliably in charge when an adult is present, but also an unsettling threat to his mother’s stability. In his absence, Frank is required to intervene.
But the situation is, naturally, unbearably complex. Aunt Perry is also raising her sons mostly in their father’s absence, albeit with private schools and a large house, and she too is unable or unwilling to provide for the children’s basic needs. The food is irregular and inadequate, the water comes from a dirty well, there are insects in the kitchen sink, there is urine all over the bathroom and nothing and no one ever washes. Frank’s cousins are casually cruel and ruthless, receiving attention from him only as insults and inconsiderate punishments which they are eager to pass on. In Frank, Patrick, and especially Odette, the cousins see scapegoats and victims.
The plot is the painfully inevitable fallacy of this scene. Since there is no consistent principle, basic parenting, for both mothers, is about “being tough.” In response to a rare complaint about Patrick’s cousins’ bullying, Frank’s mother tells him, “If you want to survive in this world, you’ll have to bear it… bear it and shut up.” She calls Odette “pudding” and sings to her that she is big and fat, until Odette screams and is scolded for being too sensitive. She scolds Frank for folding his hands when he is upset, telling him not to move his head because “you look deranged”. Although Aunt Perry is supposed to be the responsible adult when Mom can’t get out of bed or is in the hospital, she punishes the children until they learn to ask for help, whether medical care for a child with convulsions, information about their parents’ whereabouts, or protection from predatory cousins.
Edwards has been a war correspondent, and excels at the small details that tell a horrifying story. She knows when observing from a distance is more effective than full description, and how to engage readers without sensationalism. If all this sounds grim and distressing, it is not least because of the mundanity of household mess and the increasing deterioration of the mother’s health, the malice of the cousins, and the influence of Lu. Like a storm on a sultry day, the story leaves us waiting for resolution, justice and vengeance, some kind of happy ending.
I don’t think it’s spoiling anything by saying this, as is often the case, the commitment to realism that makes up this book also makes the ending difficult to imagine. There can be no happy resolution for children whose caregivers don’t care, and Edwardes has been so true to the situation that it can’t be described as a fairy-tale conclusion. His solution, like the rest of his writing, is elegant. Although it rains eventually, there is no cleansing storm and you can’t pretend the pain has been washed away. The joy here is in good writing.
