Ellen is at the end of her life and is frankly waiting to die while her extended family surrounds her, discussing her shortcomings:
It felt very unfair to be so completely mentally alert while she was lying there on her hospital bed trying to await a peaceful passing. Her hearing was perfectly intact, and as a consequence she was forced to endure the never-ending discussions about the mass of her failings.
This is the first novel from Yvvette Edwards for a decade. Her debut, A Cupboard Full of Coats (2011), longlisted for the Booker, was inspired by a friend showing her a newspaper cutting about her former partner being convicted of the murder of his next girlfriend. The Mother (2016) was about a woman whose son is murdered. The violence in this latest novel, however, is largely of the emotional kind.
Ellen had been married for 49 years to handsome, womanising Clyde, who smelt of ‘minty-spliff’ (a combination of marijuana and Wrigley’s Spearmint gum). The only sex education she had received was from her uncaring mother in Montserrat, who gnomically told her that in relationships ‘make sure you walk the straight road’. She and Clyde consequently had three children in quick succession. There followed two more children, one of whom was born as the result of Clyde’s affair with another woman.
The novel is told backwards – the first chapter set in 2020 and the last, before the epilogue, in 1972. This structure takes a while to make sense – as does the reason why Ellen’s children feel such loyalty to their father. There is use of patois, which some readers will be unfamiliar with – but it’s not hard to guess what is meant by a character’s lack of ‘broughtupsy’, for example.
Edwards tackles serious themes of displacement, racial bias in medical treatment and bereavement, but with a lightness of touch. The novel has been endorsed by both Bernadine Evaristo and Diana Evans. It’s not for me to guess whether Edwards’s intentions are similar to Evans’s, who has said that she wants to create ‘visibility and truthful representations for people of colour’, but that certainly seems to be what Good Good Loving achieves.
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