Maria in the Moon – Louise Beech, Orenda Books, 2017
At a certain point, whenever I’m writing a review, I ask myself “What is this book really about?”
Maria in the Moon, I realised, as I sat down to write this, is about so much that you can’t pin it down. It’s a huge book at the same time as being a normal-length one, a book that gives you memory and death and love and topical zeitgeisty things, that gives you the weight of the world and the problems of one woman in one flat upstairs from the takeaway.
It’s beautifully written, as we’ve come to expect from Louise Beech, not a word wasted, no description less than vivid. It’s clear and simple, deceptively simple. Its characters are as real as the people we see every day, from the wonderful Catherine-Maria to the voices at the end of the phones she answers for a flood crisis line. Its depiction of Hull is affectionate and true without being sentimental. Its management of the past and the present, of the way memory can both inspire and torment, is its central feature and its greatest triumph. It’s a book with a plot, a beginning and an end, and what’s in between is both shocking and inevitable. Louise Beech doesn’t throw ideas and symbols at you – they just seem to flow from the page, a red dress, a rabbit, a footprint, the tap-tap-tap of the water from the pipes, each both itself and something more.
It is, in short, a magnificent, brilliant book, and I defy anyone to read it without being moved.