Alice Fell

by Emma Tennant

First Edition hardcover with unclipped dust jacket designed by Mon Mohan, in very good condition. Light shelf wear to the jacket, and page block is somewhat tanned. Pages are clear and unmarked throughout. LW

Genres: British Literature

123 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Since the early 1970s, when she was in her mid-thirties, Emma Tennant has been a prolific novelist and has established herself as one of the leading British exponents of "new fiction." This does not mean that she is an imitator of either the French nouveaux romanciers or the American post-modernists, although her work reveals an indebtedness to the methods and preoccupations of some of the latter. Like them, she employs parody and rewriting, is interested in the fictiveness of fiction, appropriates some science-fiction conventions, and exploits the possibilities of generic dislocation and mutation, especially the blending of realism and fantasy. Yet, although parallels can be cited and influences suggested, her work is strongly individual, the product of an intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, attempt to create an original type of highly imaginative fiction.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story on the changing of the eras, emerging from the mist over the river in a timeless pastoral haze and into the roar of modernity circa the 1960s (The Old Times, naturally, clung on through the postwar 50s by most accounts). Tennant's graceful originality with image and language is immediately evident from page one. For instance, from page one:

At this hour, the Old Man saw his friends. Something in the acid blue of the air, the yellow irises like lights on the river, the smell of blossom, intoxicated the Old Man and made him think of his youth. His arms rose and fell, as if he were conducting. He bowed to his friends Molly and Pam and rushed them to the window, so they could see the stars stitched above vague apartment blocks, blocks of darker colour round the house as deep as the trunks of trees.

Tennant's descriptions give an otherworldly gloss to what is essentially mundane reality: a series of family portraits spanning a couple decades. There's something a bit Carter-like here, but Tennant's narrative feels a little lopsided by comparison -- an inordinate amount of the novel, for instance, expended around the birth and pre-conscious infancy of the principle character compared to the blur of later events. Perhaps this is important to set that initial sensation of motionless time soon shattered by progress, perhaps it is designed to reproduce the feeling that the world rushes onwards faster and faster, as do the events of the book, but I've seen this managed with more structural finesse. Especially if Alice is in fact our protagonist -- the book is her story yet she is seen only from outside, an automaton spotted negotiating the signs and signals of the age. An unusual book, one that keeps its distance somehow, and for me did not quite click, but which nonetheless makes me excited to explore more of Tennant's oeuvre of this period.

[Ben Winch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had moderately high hopes for this. The opening was vague in that otherworldly way I go for, but pinpoint-specific in conjuring its own world:

The moon shone in the window where the midwife stood black against the light. Over the Old Man’s part of the house the stars vanished in dust as he pointed them out to the visitors. A mist came up over the river.

At first (since they both involve birth scenes) it reminded me of Boris Vian’s Heartsnatcher, but a less wilfully obscure version that, at first, seemed more engaging. Though the prose, strafed with commas, alternately pleased and puzzled me, I eventually traced it to shades of Beckett, but without the sly nod that makes of his own contortions something lovely. True, there’s a care and clarity here that suggests a talent honed to good purpose, but what that purpose is I never understood. I left the book unfinished at page 80 without the slightest pang of regret or sense of business unfinished.

[Luke Beirne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nearly lyrical little novel that is deeply woven with layers of significance. About the transformation of people over decades.

[Lily Ruban · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Delicate like the decaying tapestries and books in the house, it leaves one with the sense that if not nurtured, the very words will fade into the mist that rolls off the downs around the Old Man’s house."