Alannah Tomkins
Review of Kill-Grief
What would it be like to inhabit a Hogarth print? To smell the gutters, run your hand along the railings and taste the fare of eighteenth-century England? Caroline Rance’s novel jolts the reader into Hogarth’s world with a vengeance – the prison, the sick-bed, and above all the street – and like Hogarth’s characters her heroine progresses from ignorance to awareness.
The story concerns Mary Helsall, a nurse by appointment if not by vocation, who takes work at the Chester infirmary for strategic reasons of her own. Her past and her motivations unfold slowly in chapters that intersperse the ‘present’ action, the latter spanning the early months of 1756.
There are men in her life determined to coerce her for their own purposes, from the lecherous Mr Racketta to the unruffled and gentlemanly Mr Barnston, a hospital subscriber. But the most dangerous men are much closer to home. Mary must hold her real and her fantasy lives in balance, to understand and decide her future relations with husband, sweetheart and would-be lover.
And then there is gin. The spirit for which the novel is named is present in all its gut-rotting glory and in many of the scenes of Mary’s life. Her bottle is filled and filled again from the hush-barrel kept by the turnkey of Chester prison, and whole sections of the book must be viewed through Mary’s battle either to drink gin or to abstain from it. Gin is nipped in secret, swigged on the street, and on one occasion poured down the throat in a violent assault on the self. Gin speaks to the characters, pledging ease and oblivion or threatening skull-splitting reprisals. This is a vivid evocation of the pleasures and pains of alcoholism in a particular time and place. It is as much a part of Mary’s life as the wooden floorboards of the infirmary ward that she scrubs with herbs, or the grey, snow-laden sky which threatens Chester in January, and it is intimately concerned with her fate.
The most significant achievement is the character of Mary herself. An unknown woman of apparently dubious morals at the start of the novel, Mary comes into focus as a complicated, contradictory, and thereby an entirely believable character. The reader has privileged access to her conscious thoughts from the start, so she is visible as a flawed, sometimes gullible, initially immature person. Yet we do not lose sympathy with Mary, and remain curious about where the rush of events will propel her and how her choices will mediate the flow of her history.
This is an impressive first novel, based on a combination of historical accuracy and imaginative verve. Readers can only hope that Caroline Rance returns us to this Hogarthian world in future.
