The Widow's Tale

by Mick Jackson

A newly-widowed woman has done a runner. She just jumped in her car, abandoned her (very nice) house in north London and kept on driving until she reached the Norfolk coast. Now she's rented a tiny cottage and holed herself away there, if only to escape the ceaseless sympathy and insincere concern. She's not quite sure, but thinks she may be having a bit of a breakdown. Or perhaps this sense of dislocation is perfectly normal in the circumstances. All she knows is that she can't sleep and may be drinking a little more than she ought to. But as her story unfolds we discover that her marriage was far from perfect. That it was, in fact, full of frustration and disappointment, as well as one or two significant secrets, and that by running away to this particular village she might actually be making her own personal pilgrimage. By turns elegiac and highly comical, The Widow's Tale conjures up this most defiantly unapologetic of narrators as she begins to pick over the wreckage of her life and decide what has real value and what she should leave behind.

Genres: Fiction, Roman, British Literature, Adult Fiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2010

About the author

Mick Jackson (born 1960) is a British writer from England, best known for his novel The Underground Man (1997). The book, based on the life of William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and for the 1997 Whitbread Award for best first novel.

Mick Jackson was born in 1960, in Great Harwood, Lancashire, and educated at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Blackburn.

Jackson worked in local theatre, studied theatre arts at Dartington College of Arts, and played in a rock band called The Screaming Abdabs. In 1990, he enrolled in a creative writing course at the University of East Anglia, and began working on The Underground Man. He has been a full-time writer since 1995.

Jackson's other works are the novels Five Boys (2002) and The Widow's Tale (2010), and the short story collections Ten Sorry Tales (2006) and The Bears of England (2009). Under the pseudonym Kirkham Jackson, he wrote the screenplay for the 2004 television film Roman Road. He lives in Brighton.

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though I'm not much like this woman, her thoughts resonate with me. Even though not much happens in the book, and we never learn details of what has happened in the past, a reader can be moved by her experiences. Discussion here:https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... has more detail & some quotes of the intelligent writing. I will read more by the author, and, since I had to buy this as none of my libraries did, I'm gonna keep it.

It may not have universal appeal or be one the top books ever in history, but it's much better than most of my 4-star reads.

[Bev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now, I have first to tell you that I have a little problem with this book, and that problem is that we are to believe that it was written by a member of the male species. You see, the author is given as one Mick Jackson. Now, is that a bloke’s name or what? Absolutely it is. You can almost imagine good old Mick in a navy singlet, well-worn jeans, perhaps a bit of plumber’s action happening at the back, a growing bald spot on top, goodness there may even be a tattoo of a stripper called Rosie on his upper left arm. This man isn’t even called Michael, or Mike, but Mick. Mick is the guy you have a pint with at the pub while the wife cooks the Sunday roast. How is it, then, that this same person can write a book which so beautifully, lucidly and intimately conveys the emotions of a woman? I am in awe. No, seriously, I am in awe. I read this book, and I took the book into my head and I took its widow into my heart.

You know I said that I was going to post my thoughts on two books today. Well, it’s pretty obvious now, isn’t it, which is getting passed on to somebody else and which will become one of my treasured Keepers. My mate Mick has given me a friend for life. I feel that I know this woman. I can relate to her on so many levels. I know exactly what she was feeling at certain times, such as wanting to yell at inappropriate moments, to sway between the hypers and hypos without any necessity for that boring old diagnosis of bi-polarism. I want to sit down and get drunk with her. But there I have a problem also. I actually don’t know what to call her. You see, for the life of me I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced, or even informally, and the sad thing is I don’t even know her name. Who is she, this new friend of mine?

I have to tell you, some of her thoughts are just wonderful, as deep as if she had spent six months in a cave with a long-haired unwashed monk and found enlightenment, while at other times she is just hilarious. I like her both ways. I just want to share a few little examples with you here.

Now, as is obvious from the title, and from the blurb from Faber and Faber, the book is about a woman who is recently widowed. Here she is contemplating death:

“It’s death’s intransigence that’s so hard to swallow. That’s the brick wall you keep coming up against. The death arrives, all done and dusted. And, frankly, how you deal with it is neither here nor there. There’s no negotiation. No higher court to whom you can appeal.”

You read a passage like that and you go: Wow, she is so right there; it’s a done deal, and your reaction is irrelevant to the fact of it.

Or this:

“Losing one’s husband really is a complete bummer. But let’s look on the bright side. I’ve actually lost a little weight. Oh, there’s loss of all sorts going on around here. Mind you, I wasn’t particularly chunky to begin with. And unfortunately, after a certain age, when you lose a few pounds you don’t look any younger. Just pinched and scrawny. And those mad, staring eyes don’t help.”

These passages should certainly not suggest that the book is in any way morbid. Consider the following, which comes when she is checking out – for the first time in her life – the Lonely Hearts column in the newspaper:

“Euphemisms abound. ‘Petite lady’ is, I imagine, meant to imply ‘on the short side’, but hints at being a little bit French. ‘Rubenesque’ presumably means curvaceous, and possible even ‘the larger lady’, but suggests that given the right circumstances she might be talked into lying naked on your settee. Sadly, in such exotic company, the few women who try to maintain a little dignity come across as simply frumpy. What, I wonder, is the shorthand for ‘I have a PhD’? Possibly plain ‘PhD”. But I doubt that’s going to fill your mailbag. Not when you’re competing with women of the foxy and Rubenesque variety.”

The circumstances are not funny, but the writing is wryly so:

“I’m slowly pickling myself. I’m going to be a biological phenomenon. Perfectly preserved, in all my widow’s glory. They’re going to put me in a big glass jar in some dusty museum. The accompanying notice will say, ‘Due to all the booze sloshing around in her system this woman managed to live to be 250 years old. Unfortunately, the last couple of hundred were a complete and utter blur’.”

I want to quote half the book, but I would much rather you read it for yourself. It really is a superb book and one that deserves to be on everyone’s top shelf.

Despite the fact that I have since purchased Mr Jackson’s Booker Prize short-listed novel The Underground Man, I still have my doubts about him. Are you sure it’s Mick and not Michelle?

[Sofia Hallay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite honestly I found the book simply boring. It's about a 63 year old woman, recently widowed, struggling through the first months of bereavement. She runs off to Norfolk, where she rents a little cottage and around the end of her stay, stalks a man she thinks is her ex lover. But the stalking begins in the last 50 pages of the book or so, and it is nothing adventurous really. The first 200 pages are basically her doing everyday things, from going to a walk to going to the supermarket; obsessing about small boring things; and the occasional thinking back, her memories being the only parts that I found moderately interesting.

[Sandra Barnard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sadly this woman really irritated me. Talk about first world angst!. She had a kind and loving husband and an easy life, with a big house in London and a house in France. She has a fling with a much younger man whom she becomes obsessed about. When her husband dies, she appears to wallow in abject self pity, and sets out to stalk her previous lover, rather than actually grieving her dear departed. She is utterly self obsessed and selfish. sorry you do not get my vote of sympathy. Go have another G&T.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. I had expected it to be more sombre in tone, or a little depressing and so was pleasently surprised by the wit of our caustic, nameless widow.This strong no nonsense narrative voice made me sit up for the first twenty pages or so - as it was so not what I was expecting, yet our narrator emerges as as strong quirky character, who I found brilliantly realisitic and often very funny. Having lost her husband around 3 months earlier she is somewhat lost, drinking too much, and irritated by well meaning friends. In this mood she fleas to north Norfolk, where she takes a tiny cottage, and walks on the saltmarshes, buys a tiny second hand car, and obsesses over a book of Holbein prints. Reflecting back over her life as a wife, and even before that as a young girl, we get to know this interesting complex woman as she starts to make some sense of her life, and understand things about herself and her marriage. We come to see why that part of Norfolk has drawn her back, and how it helps to set her on a straighter path. There is a lot of poignancy in this novel, a good deal about loss and grief, helped along by some really good writing.

[Dora · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected to enjoy this book as I live in North Norfolk and recognise all the villages mentioned. However, it was dull and I had to force myself to keep reading.

I didn’t like the character of the widow herself as she came over as arrogant and very unfriendly. She seems to think she is a cut above everybody else. Some chapters of the book were like reading a travel article in a Sunday magazine with descriptions of The Slipper Chapel at Walsingham or a restaurant in a nearby village and did nothing for the overall story itself.

I am not sure why Mick Jackson decided to write about a woman fleeing to North Norfolk but it didn’t work and maybe he would have been better writing it from his own male perspective.

The weirdest thing is that as I went to write my review, a different cover of the book appeared on screen to the copy I have and I recognised it as having read it some years ago. It obviously made no impression on me at all back then either!!

A disappointing book.

[Michelle Nause · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was just okay. There wasn't any one thing wrong with it. The writing was good, stream-of-consciousness. There was just something about it that didn't grab me. That, and after I was about halfway through I got tired of listening to someone else's constant complaints about life - no matter how good of a story they told. That is, I would venture, one of the perils about writing a book about a new widow in the stream-of-consciousness narrator.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a tale ostensibly about grieving, solitude and brushes with a breakdown, this is bizarrely enjoyable. The credit for this belongs to the voice of the narrator, a slightly caustic, eccentric woman in her early sixties. It's three months after the death of her husband John and she has surprised herself by fleeing on impulse to a lonely stretch of the coast, where she drinks heavily, goes on long walks and struggles both to sleep and to shut off her whirling brain. Her behaviour is erratic and frequently undignified, but she's past caring, and even derives a blackly humorous, absurdist kind of glee from picturing herself as she must appear to others. She observes her own neuroses and risky impulses with a curiosity and self-deprecation that, oddly enough, is extremely funny. Her imagination is dark and quick-leaping, and her tongue whetted sharp. Despite how very adrift the widow is, she hasn't sunk and nor will she.
Jackson weaves the themes of pilgrimage, penance and retreat into his depiction of bereavement in such a way that we come to understand this strange sabbatical in the widow's life, her 'dark night of the soul', to be a step on her path back to the world.

[D.L. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can't remember the last time I read a book where I hated the protagonist as much as I hated the unnamed widow in this book. She was selfish, mean-spirited and just insane -- and by her own choosing, so it seemed. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why she was so broken up about her husband's death when she apparently neither loved or even liked the man in life. She was a miserable person through and through and because of that, I had to give this just 1 star. Ugh.

[Brigitte · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some observations resonated with me but I found the book a bit dull. It's not clear what sort of man the deceased was or what their relationship was like. I couldn't engage with the character and it was obvious the author is male. There was description of the millions of thoughts and emotions that go through a widow's mind so I found it disappointing.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked her voice.

[Sue Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was book club choice. Difficult to discuss as half the members are widows.

[Vlady Peters · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful prose creating concise and insightful pictures of a mind travelling backwards and forwards into the state of marriage and widowhood.

But while one can almost see and hear the same sights and sounds experienced by the widow, the thinnest of the story line begins to pall as the narrative continues to reveal too little, too slowly.

The widow appears to be a feisty older woman; not backwards in coming forwards, and not lacking in self-belief. Yet on the other hand tears are constantly springing to her eyes. One could excuse that on the grounds of her new state of widowhood. But easy tears were there before her widowhood, though she’s definitely not a shrinking violet.

The author does bring out some points that should be addressed by every couple in anticipation of one partner being left behind. There is the current attraction for retiring people escaping to the country. In Australia it means you can buy a house and land so far away from civilisation that you need a helicopter to get you to the nearest hospital and an extremely serviceable car to get you to the nearest shop. This at a time when you can only expect to get feeblier and needier.

Then there’s the scenario where only one of the couple handles the finances. This is fraught with more than one peril. Firstly, the obvious one is where the one left behind doesn’t even know how to pay a bill. The second, and more important one, is where the spouse handling the finances sees the money in a proprietary way, spending it in ways that the sleeping partner could not possibly agree to if she or he were consulted on the matter. We’ve all seen films, or read books, where a wife used to a comfortable life, suddenly at her husband’s death discovers her life turned upside down by the debts the husband has been accumulating unbeknown to her.

However, this particular widow does not face any real problems. She knows how to look after herself. She has no financial problems. The only thing that is new in her life, is her husband’s death; and after forty years of married life, marriage has become a bit humdrum anyway.

So why all these tears and introspection? Perhaps because after forty years she’s alone. But then she’s run away from her home where people know her, to an isolated village where nobody knows her. Well, there’s a little more to it than that. But on the whole, it’s hard to be empathetic or sympathetic because there seems to be nothing to be empathetic or sympathetic about.

[Ruth P · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had mixed feelings about this book and do wonder if I felt it to be too masculine a take on widowhood. Bits were enjoyable and I liked the Norfolk setting...but other bits did not strike an authentic note so only 3 stars.

[Lindsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult one to rate. I did enjoy reading it and I know lots of people have said how they felt the author did a good job of portraying a woman’s point of view, but for me it just wasn’t a woman’s voice and therefore didn’t feel quite right.

[Simon Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a funny book. Some chapters seem to exist purely as a vehicle for the author's amusingly cynical views of life. And this is also a poignant book, as it deals with the aftermath of a death. It's very good.

[John Ollerton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed it, I was expecting the denouement........ Wasn't expecting that...
Mick Jackson really is a very good writer.

[Judith Whelan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't warm to the character at all. Little insight into her as a person and very disjointed accounts of her life and thoughts

[Brian Moore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Up towards 3.5 but not quite there for me. Would I gushingly recommend, not necessarily but neither would I put anyone off giving it a go.
Some fine observations.

[Angelina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much: it’s a funny, heartfelt and surprisingly beautiful depiction of grief and everything that comes with it.

[Mila · Rating 3 out of 5]

In my opinion, Mick Jackson is a wonderful author. Which is why I picked this up despite otherwise not being interested in it at all. And it worked, it is a very insightful work about a widowed woman that is believable and in many ways entirely realistic in her flaws. Even the almost mad episodes seem understandable given her situation, character and age. Much like 'the Undergroung Man' this lets the reader see through the lens of a rather unlikely protagonist, but unlikely the main character of this other book of his, the widow is not quite as quirky and weird, which makes for a beautiful and well written, but in the end rather forgettable and not too interesting story. This proves that Mick Jackson can basically write anything and make it good, but unlike most of his other works, for me it just didn't exceed 'good'. It is enjoyable enough to read but not the kind of book I would recommend to others or feel the need to reread.

[Dara Golden · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a fine holiday read that I wouldn't really recommend to most people.

[Jane Lythell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. A recently bereaved widow goes on a pilgrimage to North Norfolk. She is still in shock and feeling grief and wants to make sense of what is happening to her, which is probably a breakdown. She walks across the Salt Marshes, examines a painting by Holbein she cares about, remembers a retreat she went on and thinks about the men she has loved. What is so fantastic about the book is the voice of the Widow. We never know her name but a sense of her comes through so strongly. This may sound grim but it's not. It is witty and authentic because the voice of the Widow is acerbic, intelligent, self-deprecating with some very enjoyable forays into malice and rudeness about others. The novel is about the big things Love and Death.

[Rosemarie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not the book I read. Wrong author

The one I read was about a husband who lost his wife and then went on with life w/his daughters and a making of a preschool out of his barn on his property which one of his daughters worked at.

Can't remember the author offhand.

R Adams

The book I read is 'The Widower's Tale, Julia Glass , I did enjoy. Nice story of a widowed man continuing life with family and friends and new projects. Good read 3 stars

[Teryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the protaganist, would enjoy meeting her, however, she clearly does not enjoy people that much. She has such a dry humour, a light way of expressing really dark feelings and you feel for her in her pain. She is so human! Full of flaws, made many mistakes, not really done much that is constructive in her life, and still trying to find her way at 63.

[Trish]

I enjoyed the description of the north Norfolk coast in this book. Unfortunately I had little sympathy for this widow, crazed by grief though she was. I don't think the male author had got this woman right. For a little example, I know no woman who is happy to drink in a pub alone, let alone have a pint of beer with a whiskey chaser.

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not giving too much away to say that the narrator of The Widow's Tale has just lost her husband & Mick Jackson's book follows her attempts to cope with this loss. He has done a great job of creating a believable, eccentric & humorous character who is a joy to read. Not a whole lot happens in the novel, but it provides an interesting insight into bereavement, loneliness & ageing.

[Sally Boocock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by a man this novel shows surprising insight into how a woman feels grieving and living with past mistakes.He writes with humour and sensitivity covering the first few months of widowhood. I'm sure many women could relate to the woman.whose name you never know, and do exactly as she did.

[Susanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rather enjoyed the company of the widow. Winter on the N. Norfolk coast is accurately invoked - lonely and bitterly cold.

[Karina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny and poignant. Authentic description of North Norfolk life. Stayed in my mind for long time.