Guest review by Sue Hampton: LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT A MAN I KNEW by Susan Fletcher

 

"Many books today are described as beautifully written but few earn that accolade with such simplicity and poetry." 

Photograph by Mikaela Morgan

Sue Hampton gave up primary school teaching to become a full-time author in 2008, and has now published more than forty titles for adults, including Shutdown and Ravelled and Other Stories, as well as for children and teens. "Having been praised by authors I respect, including Michael Morpurgo, I was booked by about 600 schools to deliver writing workshops, and supported many students with hair loss as an Ambassador for Alopecia UK. I now prioritise climate and peace activism and being a grandma. This is just as well, because schools won't touch me with a criminal record. For the last few years I have donated any author earnings to Extinction Rebellion."

I’ve read it at least five times but still my response to this novel is as passionate as love should be. Experiencing a washday as the story begins, with water rushing on stone and the wind tugging at the line, the reader might feel the weight of a slow, meditative quietness. But it’s deceptively full: a sensual, tender exploration of the ordinary as Jeanne, the warden’s wife at the asylum in Provence, bears through each day’s labour her secret longing and loss. Literature can boast many rite-of-passage storylines built around young protagonists but here the awakening comes late for a mature woman aching for her grown-up sons and long-used to the stone colours of her faded marriage. Used to being unseen, without power or voice. And what awakens her is not the kind of encounter fiction leads us to expect, not that kind of relationship but the symbiosis of art and nature. Because yes, Van Gogh comes to the hospital, but the author knows better than to inhabit his disturbed yet gifted spirit, showing us instead the beauty of a brown moth barely visible on a branch. The writing is in itself painterly, and like the artist’s work stirs the senses while connecting with something profoundly moving about unremarkable humanity.

There is deep sadness here, but the joy is overwhelmingly intense, and this slow, gentle novel delivers masterfully understated drama before the muted but emotional resolution. Jeanne is as ordinary and overlooked as the moth on the branch, yet richly sympathetic and somehow compelling, and as the reader becomes intimate with her, Fletcher gradually creates in her cold husband a man we slowly come to know (as we don’t know Vincent) and understand. With a generous author whose shifts are subtle and whose love embraces flawed reality, the minor characters live too, even when only presented from Jeanne’s perspective. From the starting point of a lesser-known portrait – one of a pair because Van Gogh painted the warden too – Susan Fletcher has opened up the vivid inner life the artist could only suggest, taking us back to the uninhibited girl and sacrificial mother, through the grief and anxiety that seem to her as natural as the weather and as impossible to resist. The Mistral rips through the climax but the work of a troubled painter can also recover and reshape a different kind of landscape between two people.

Reading it for the first time I hoped the author would shun the easy, predictable choices, the corrosively depressing, the sentimental or melodramatic. And she does, with restrained delicacy. There are no misjudgements in arc or tone as she keeps it all as real as Jeanne herself. Many books today are described as beautifully written but few earn that accolade with such simplicity and poetry. I’m a climate protester and it’s been with me in HMP Bronzefield and more than one police cell, where it’s meant a little light and warmth and hope and made a dark world seem worth saving.

Let me tell you about a Man I knew is published by Virago.