Skip to main content

Susan Fletcher. Eve Green. London: Harper Perennial, 2005

Evangeline is 29 and pregnant. She thinks about the baby she is about to have, and remembers her own mother who died when she was eight. She is sent to live on a Welsh farm with her grandparents who she had never met; she adapts, and develops a deep affection for them, the farm and the landscape. Eve Green is an observant novel, sensitively written, with close detail that allows the reader to become absorbed in the world of the story. Fletcher writes with a great sense of affection for people and place and, although I was astonished to find the editor had missed the phrase ‘bored of’, there are some deft touches; ‘I felt that our secrets had been pressed together, twisted into the same shape, and that they couldn’t be peeled apart again.’ Memories are interwoven with her childhood perspective of detail from one long, hot summer, when a girl from the village went missing. Fletcher inserts little pieces of supposition, as a child might speculate, and builds up tension around Eve’s childhood narrative. This is a really gentle novel which evokes a strong sense of place and with some lovely turns of phrase to savour.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

ACCATONE! Dir Piers Paulo Pasolini. 1961

Accatone! (1961) is the first film by director Piers Paulo Pasolini and re-relased as part of a box set of his work. Accatone! features a pitiless, self-serving, manipulative young pimp living in the slums and rubble of Rome, whose lassitude is infectious. Images of his death recur throughout the film and he seems barely living. The exclamation mark in the title may be there to try and wake him up. Pasolini shot the film on the streets, using the people he found there rather than professional actors. The effect is a slow moving realism which casts the viewer as reluctant voyeur; it is impossible to gain any distance from the unrelenting sadism of hollow machismo. Seeing this film fifty years after it was made, the misogyny in this film is deeply disturbing; women are either Madonna, virgin or whore. Accatone says prostitution is ‘a mother’s situation’ which provides the mixed message that it’s selfless and necessary for survival, yet he and his friends view whores as trash; to...

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY. Dir Mike Leigh. 2008

Simple, retarded asthmatic gasps and giggles her way through this nonsensical film from Mike Leigh. 30 year old Poppy’s arrested development is masked by her carer who provides meals and stability. This form of care in the community works well so that Poppy is able to extend her adolescence in this flat-sharing arrangement by climbing into bed with her carer and exhibiting teenage tactile behaviour. Her flatmate is tolerant, even when getting no answers as to where Poppy has been and whether or not she’s ok. To Poppy’s credit she holds down a job. Inconceivably a primary school teacher, she is left in a position of responsibility with young children for long periods without supervision. However, classroom activities are restricted to making masks out of brown paper bags in case anyone thought primary school teaching involved real work. Leigh raises the possibility of serious subject matter when a boy begins to bully others. Without parental involvement, a Socia...

e-Marketing 3

Why bother with social media? Specialize in email marketing, business to business, using mailing lists. email campaigns are: Cost effective, immediate, flexible, interactive, measurable and environmentally friendly. Targetted emails are welcome whereas Spam is a nuisance so it’s important to research your mailing list, discover what the recipients are interested in, either hobbies or products, and narrow down the list so the campaign is more likely to hit interested people – and not be deleted before reading. Some companies opt to supplement email campaigns with occasional high quality postal mailings, ie brochures- their promotional material sending a tangible message of quality and style. This is a sophisticated method. The measurable element includes basic statistics such as how many emails were sent and at what time, then quantifies how many of those were delivered, bounced back, opened, read, how many were ‘clicked through’ to the company website or unsubscribed. Conversio...