Our tribute to Helen Dunmore, poet and novelist, 1952-2017

"Helen Dunmore died much too young. But we have her books and they abide."

Celia Rees: Helen Dunmore was one of those writers who could do everything, seemingly effortlessly. As well as her prize-winning adult fiction, she wrote for children and young adults and she wrote poetry. It seems wrong to be writing about her in the past tense. She was the kind of writer you thought would always be there to show the rest of us how it is done.

I remember sitting opposite her at a jolly Hay Festival dinner hosted by Scholastic. I confess to being more than a little star struck but she was as charming as she was beautiful. Her fame was immaterial. She joined in happily with the table talk and laughter, all writers together. We will all miss her. I can’t believe she’s gone.

Linda Newbery: I never met Helen Dunmore or heard her speak, but somehow feel that I have, through the impact her books have made on me as both reader and writer.

She died just two days before the announcement of the Baileys Prize for Women's Fiction, of which she was the first winner (in its original incarnation as the Orange Prize) for A Spell of Winter. In her last few days she wrote a poignant poem about the approach of death, Hold Out Your Arms. She was a poet as well as a novelist, and it showed in everything she wrote: in the precision and sensuousness of her language and the seductiveness of her rhythms.

Her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, was widely praised for its freshness and immediacy and the luminosity of its prose. I read that on publication and have read most of her books since. Her subjects were wide-ranging: the First World War and its aftermath, the Siege of Leningrad, the French Revolution seen from England, domestic life with its tensions and rivalries. The Greatcoat was a novella for Random House's Hammer series in which a haunted figure brings back the terrible losses of aircrew in the war (a subject which resonates with me, as my father was a navigator in Bomber Command). She could be deeply unsettling, as in the relationship between brother and sister in A Spell of Winter and between sisters in Talking to the Dead. Everything she wrote had her distinctive stamp of honesty, insightfulness and lyricism.

She wrote wonderfully about landscapes and weather, especially in the coastal settings she loved. Here is Daniel, in The Lie, looking down from a cottage roof. "There was the brown, bare, sinewy land running down to the cliffs. There were the Garracks, and Giant's Cap, and the Island. There was the swell, like a muscle under the sea, moving in long, slow pulses to Porthgwyn. I looked west and saw rainclouds, damson-coloured and making a bloom of shadow on the sea." She was always good on food, as here, when Nina in Talking to the Dead makes a tart: "the apples must be cut evenly, in fine crescents of equal thickness, which will lap around in ring after ring, hooping inwards, glazed with apricot jam. The tart must cook until the tips of the apple rings are almost black, but the fruit itself is still plump and moist. When you close your eyes and bite you must taste caramel, sharp apple, juice and the short, sandy texture of sweet pastry all at once." It's enough to make you salivate. Food is abundant in this novel, while in The Siege she wrote powerfully and unforgettably about hunger and cold, desperation and survival.

Completing her final novel, Birdcage Walk, she knew of her terminal cancer. In its Afterword, she wrote: "The question of what is left behind by a life haunts the novel. While I finished and edited it I was already seriously ill, but not yet aware of this. I suppose that a writer’s creative self must have access to knowledge of which the conscious mind and the emotions are still ignorant, and that a novel written at such a time, under such a growing shadow, cannot help being full of a sharper light, as a landscape becomes brilliantly distinct in the last sunlight before a storm."

I'm glad now that there are Helen Dunmore novels and poems I haven't yet read. I will ration them out to myself, in order not to use up the new reading experience too quickly. She was an exhilarating, generous talent whose words sing from the page and will ensure that she is remembered.

Adèle Geras: I can't remember the year exactly, but it was in the early 1980s. I'd just started to write poems again. I'd not written any since leaving school in 1963. I entered a competition run by the Lancaster Festival and judged by Ian McMillan. Lancaster had a very kind way of awarding prize winners: all the poems the judge liked were published together in a pamphlet and the poets were invited to Lancaster for a reading.

Some of us went out to an Italian restaurant afterwards, and I can't account for why, but Helen Dunmore was at that meal and I was sitting opposite her at the table. Years later, when I started reading her novels with enormous pleasure, I would think back to that lunch and my memories of what she was like. Trivial as it may sound when you consider her gifts as a poet and novelist, my abiding memory is of her beauty. Photos don't do justice to it. I would say: radiant, but that sounds trite. Trite but true.

The last book I read by her was Exposure, which I really loved and couldn't put down. I read what she wrote as she published what she knew was to be her last book, and the grace and bravery of her words was some consolation in the face of the tragic news she was conveying. I defy anyone to read her final poem without weeping.

Helen Dunmore died much too young. But we have her books and they abide.

What are your memories of Helen Dunmore? Or your favourites of her novels, stories and poems? Do please add your comments as part of this tribute to an exceptional and much-loved writer.

Thank you!

Guest review by Sophie Masson: READY TO LOVE by Jon Appleton

"The city background of these contemporary thirty-something professionals is painted with a light yet vivid touch, adding to the enjoyment of a novel that is both most entertaining and elegantly written."

Born in Indonesia of French parents, and brought up in France and Australia, Sophie Masson is the award-winning and internationally-published author of over 60 books for children, young adults and adults. Her latest young adult novel is Hunter's Moon, (Random House Australia) while her latest adult novel is Trinity: The False Prince, (Momentum.) Sophie is also a founding partner and co-director of Christmas Press, a boutique publishing house producing acclaimed children's picture-books and fiction. She holds a BA and M.Litt from the University of New England in Australia and is currently undertaking a PHD in Creative Practice at the same university. She is on the Boards of the Australian Society of Authors, the New England Writers' Centre and the Small Press Network. She has also served on the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the Book Industry Collaborative Council.

Writing about nice, ‘ordinary’ people, in a way that will make readers want to keep turning the pages, is not easy. And writing about nice people made tentative and ineffectual by life’s defeats and challenges—and other people’s attitudes and expectations--is harder still. In many ways, it’s so much simpler to write flamboyant, selfish, silly or psychopathic characters: those extreme personality traits can be very useful characterisation shortcuts. So it’s a real achievement when a writer not only pulls off the difficult task, but does it with keen observation and generous wit, as Jon Appleton does in his debut novel, Ready to Love.

As its title indicates, Ready to Love can broadly be described as a romantic comedy. Set in contemporary London, it’s centred around two main characters: Minna, who’s just ended a relationship with self-absorbed Julian, latest in a short line of unsatisfactory lovers; and Jeff, still hurting from the breakup with his equally self-absorbed wife Sarah a year ago. Neither Minna nor Jeff have been ‘high-flyers’ or ‘movers or shakers’ in the world of work anymore than they have been marked successes in their love lives, but they are good people who try to do the best they can by their colleagues and families and friends. Unfortunately, that can lead to them being patronised or even bullied by stronger personalities who think that they know better than Minna or Jeff what each of them are like or should do.

The reader hopes of course that these two nice yet rather bruised and tentative—but never pathetic or unsympathetic-- people will eventually find the beginnings of happiness with each other once they realise that they are, indeed, ‘ready for love’, but it’s not just that, pleasant as it is, which keeps you absorbed in the novel. In an interview I conducted recently with Jon Appleton, he said that, Ready to Love is about the way we see ourselves and how we think other people see us, and the different kinds of attachments we form to those around us: family, friends, lovers, colleagues. And that is what makes the book so satisfying: too often, in romantic comedies, the focus is just on the search for love, but in this novel, the author does not forget the other large chunks of life, including the everyday world of work, which in real life takes up so much of people’s time, thoughts, and emotional energy. And the great cast of secondary characters, from all the different areas of Minna’s and Jeff’s lives, are deftly sketched in with telling detail.

Jon also mentioned in the interview how important the novel’s London setting was to him, as the idea for it came out of a feeling of homesickness when he was living away from his London home for a year, but was developed fully later, when he was back. That development is evident in the novel, where the city background of these contemporary thirty-something professionals is painted with a light yet vivid touch, adding to the enjoyment of a novel that is both most entertaining and elegantly written.

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