‘Tamar Fell’s a
bastard! Tamar Fell’s a bastard!’ Bertie McAffery was jumping up and down on
the pavement in front of her, ginger hair flopping over his forehead, mouth
pulled wide, screwed into a goggle-eyed gurning face as he taunted her...
The opening sentences of The
Sun’s Companion are indicative of what is to come. Kathleen Jones tells her
story with unflinching honesty, never shying away from the occasional cruelty
of both life and people; but her beautiful use of language, vivid narrative,
and compassion make for a satisfying and poignant (but never maudlin) story.
How can I describe this novel? My first thought would be
that it falls under the umbrella of literary fiction, though admittedly there’s
some debate about what exactly literary fiction is (I feel another blog post coming on...). Is it, then, general fiction?
Genre fiction? – no, probably not, though it shares elements of both romance
and historical fiction.
Of course, none of this matters in the slightest. It’s
undeniably useful for booksellers to be able to classify products, but most of
us care less about how a book is labelled than whether it’s a good story. And The Sun’s Companion is a very good story
indeed.
It’s 1935, and the shadow of Nazism is beginning to spread
across Europe. In England, young Tamar Fell is eking out a precarious existence
with her reckless mother Sadie. Together they move from town to town, from
lodging house to lodging house, constantly running from debt, failed jobs and
relationships, and their neighbours’ disapproval. Tamar has no other family
that she knows of; her father, she has been told, is dead. Tamar, though she
loves her mother, yearns for stability and a family, and feels suffocated by
the limitations imposed on her by her upbringing and circumstances.
Meanwhile, in Germany, another girl, Anna, is also coming to
terms with being an outcast. Being ethnically Jewish, even though she doesn’t
feel herself as such – her mother is English, her father a German Jew who
converted to Christianity – she is the frequent target of the taunts, and worse,
of her one-time neighbours and schoolfriends. Early in the novel, her English
mother takes the momentous, desperate decision to take Anna to live in England,
leaving her father and other relatives behind.
Anna’s new home in North Shields is, however, not a great
improvement from her point of view. She is homesick, and misses her father. She
feels like an outsider in the strange surroundings of the industrial North, and
does not have a particularly close relationship with her mother or
grandparents. Her only real pleasure is painting, which gradually becomes both
her passion and her projected career path.
She and Tamar have dissimilar characters, and come from very
different backgrounds, but when they meet they soon become close friends. Their
situations, after all, do mirror each other to an extent: both are outsiders,
and both have ambitions that are stifled by their circumstances. We follow
their intertwined stories through the late 30s and early 40s, as Europe tips
over the brink into war. Jones charts the war’s effects on their lives and
their relationships as they grow into women; we learn about their first loves,
their stifled ambitions, and their attempts to make their own lives in
difficult circumstances. Both characters are vividly-drawn and realistic; Anna,
with her sharp tongue and barely-suppressed inner rage, is not always pleasant,
but she is ultimately always sympathetic.
Also vivid and lifelike is the novel’s background of wartime
North Shields and rural Cumbria. The story takes us to various and quite
diverse places – grimy lodging houses, internment camps and lonely farms, to
name but a few – and all are realistically drawn, and immediate. A great deal
of research must have gone into The Sun’s
Companion, but – as with so many good books – the sheer hard work is
lightly worn, and barely noticeable.
Honest, engrossing, moving but never sentimental – The Sun’s Companion is highly
recommended.
