We Need to Talk about Beside the Sea: by Dan Holloway

we-need-to-talk-about-kevin2Sometimes, without you even noticing it, a book will wander out of the media’s review pages and plant its bum firmly on the features seat. It’s impossible to unravel the vagaries of the process by which some cheeky little volumes manage to do this whilst others stick to their day jobs: garnering praise, raising the odd book group eyebrow, and leaving the public imagination largely untouched.

One book that pulled off the feat was Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin. Narrated by Eva Khatchadourian, whose son Kevin carries out a (OK, let’s roll out the cliches) Columbine-style killing, the book takes the form of Eva’s turgidly-written, tediously self-absorbed letters to her estranged husband. In them she painstakingly unpicks any stitching that would have attached blame to her for Kevin’s atrocity. The book sparked a debate that raged way beyond the confines of the arts pages: about mother-child relations, the culpability of underage killers, whether monsters are born or made (the irony that Eva, not Kevin, is the book’s true monster was generally lost—the book being just a little too self-involved and stodgy for many readers to get to the end). In the process, Shriver sold a gazillion copies and won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her efforts.

Earlier this year, another book appeared on the UK market. Veronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea was the first offering from the superb in-translation press, Peirene. A bestseller in its native France, Beside the Sea tells the story of a mother who takes her two young boys to the seaside. It follows the family through the usual seaside entertainments and cafes, tracing the mother’s rather sorry attempts to give them the holiday of a lifetime. Only, something is wrong. Something brewing amidst the confusion in her mind, as her maternal love blurs with her fear of a world that has only been unkind to her. As readers we can only look on as a tragedy unfolds in slow motion, until in the (literally) ultimate act of protective love, the mother kills her sons.

31fnLkYijOL._SS500_Beside the Sea has been labelled a masterpiece wherever it has been reviewed. Its intense prose, and the addled logic of the mother’s narration; the heavy pull of the inevitable conclusion working its way back through the story like the approaching rattle of a tumbrel’s wheels; the unflinching ending that leaves the reader shellshocked. All left their mark on reviewers, sparking writerly debates about voice and intensity, as well as admiring but barely muffled shrieks of horror—that ending! She did it! She really did it, didn’t pull the punch. How could she do that? Wow!

There was critical response, there was personal response, but there wasn’t the sociological, or ethical response Shriver’s work provoked. Why? Is it because Beside the Sea is that scary thing, a work “in translation”? Is it because Olmi has kept her peace on the other side of the Channel whilst Shriver is, frankly, a bit of a self-publicist? Possibly.

But possibly it’s something more than that. Firstly, Kevin is a middle class book about a middle class nightmare. Eva is a very middle-class narrator whose concerns before “Thursday”, as she calls the massacre, centred on interior decoration; whose concerns afterwards are worryingly often about what the neighbours think of her at the shops. Beside the Sea‘s narrator is a working-class woman with learning difficulties, someone who struggles to do the daily shop, both with money and the basic logistics of it all. And the literary media belongs to a middle class that understands the former more directly than it does the latter.

Second, and related, it is Eva Khatchadourian, not Kevin, who displays the trait most frequently associated with real-life sociopaths—self-pity, and its symptomology of self-justification. Beside the Sea‘s narrator is incapable of self-pity. She is so utterly consumed by the day-to-day, so motivated by the mix of fear and love, that introspection is beyond her. It is not her learning difficulties that make her internal life unedited—it’s the fact that her life is, simply, immediate. It is a series of actions and perceptions, not reflections and concepts. Perhaps such a character is alien to English speakers. She is certainly more like someone from a Camus novel than anyone from recent English language works, with the possible exception of Vernon God Little. Perhaps we are just not capable of understanding what it is like to live such a life, and so cannot help imputing motives to her that we find repulsive because we cannot strip out our own complexities. Perhaps we are incapable of reading a novel that does not come with Woody Allen’s neuroses as its built-in commentary. Perhaps, in other words, we were so happy to debate Kevin because it was all so—at the risk of sounding absurd—familiar. Beside the Sea asks if it is possible, if it is human, for a mother to kill out of love. But maybe we are just incapable of seeing love as anything other than a concept that’s been discussed (over cappuccino with one’s girlfriends or shrink), incapable of seeing it for what it actually is—a pre-cognitive force.

But is there something else? Something in the subject matter? Mothers killing their children is not a non-existent occurrence. When it hits the news, as the Andrea Yates story did around the time Beside the Sea was published, it hits the news big. So why isn’t this book dragged into these debates the way Kevin is whenever Columbine is mentioned? Perhaps the answer is in our need for a monster. We need that headline to read “Mothers Who Kill!” with the exclamation mark. We need them to be animals, or at the least suffering from barely comprehensible extremes of postnatal depression.

Beside the Sea refuses to give us that. It gives us a mother who kills from love. A mother with difficulties, sure, but difficulties that in no way affect her love for her children. Like a traditional sociopath, within her worldview her logic is faultless. Unlike the sociopath, it is driven not by a skewed egoism but a skewed altruism. The bedrock of her worldview is simply that the world is too dangerous a place in which to raise children—a bedrock people share. And if Olmi’s narrator were using it, reflectively, to justify childlessness, many of the chattering classes would no doubt nod their approval.

And possibly that’s the main reason we don’t talk about Beside the Sea as anything but “great literature” or “horrific”. To do so is just too uncomfortable. Just where does the line between saintly altruism and monstrosity lie? Perhaps it lies in a place on the spectrum of maternal behaviour where we really don’t want to find it. And the narrator’s worldview makes disturbingly convincing reading. It makes sense. Only it can’t make sense. It can’t be allowed to. Because if it does, the conclusion sort of makes sense too, doesn’t it? But it can’t. We want to utter a pre-emptive “no”. So we do. Olmi has got it wrong. She must have. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s fiction. Great fiction. And horrific. But fiction. Not a mirror held up under a bright light to our unmade, unbotoxed, blemished and collagen-free faces.

Maybe Shriver is also holding up a mirror, and having the last laugh at the expense of a public too quick to empathise with Eva. Quite possibly. But she has written a book so overtly pleased with itself that if she is, she’s doing it in the manner of a Niles to her readers’ Frasier, like a piece of wink winkish intellectual one-upmanship, and we are back to over-analysing and conceptualising. On the other hand, the triumph of Olmi’s book is that it doesn’t analyse. At all. It presents us with a mother’s love and its consequences—there is no membrane, no gap, no space between the two for our “but”s and our “hang on a minute”s. And that is very very uncomfortable.

Maybe our lack of debate and refusal to question—our instantaneous reactions of horror and amazement—are the most faithful reactions of all to Olmi’s immediate portrayal of love, her phenomenological narration. There, that’s a good answer. Very neat. Very intellectual. Nice and easy. Only. We need to talk about it. Don’t we?

Dan Holloway is the author of Songs from the Other Side of the Wall and (life:) razorblades included. He has presented papers on gender, text, and identity at a range of international conferences. Dan runs eight cuts gallery press.