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Sue Gee lives in Highbury Fields, which is also home to one of the characters in her latest novel |
Growing old to Radio 4
Sue Gee enjoyed writing her latest book, a quirky story about love and the experiences of ‘women of a certain age’.
Review by Ruth Gorb
Reading in Bed. By Sue Gee
Headline £19.99.
READING in Bed: a seductive title for a book which was meant to start like this: “Chloe, wearing her beaded jacket, was washing a lettuce.”
The author, Sue Gee, liked the opening line and she liked her young heroine: Chloe is stylish, disorganised, looks like Audrey Hepburn, and is very appealing.
Then one dark, wet night, when Sue Gee had been giving a bookshop-reading in Stoke Newington, she saw two tall women of a certain age running towards her car.
“That’s it,” she thought.
“‘There they go, two clever women of sixty…’. I like that line.”
It was a moment that unlocked a new kind of writing for her, one that made her say: “I shall enjoy writing this book.”
The book, hugely enjoyable for readers as well as writer, has those two women at its heart. Chloe, however, stays too chaotic and lovable to abandon.
Reading in Bed is the latest in a whole string of highly acclaimed novels by Sue Gee, all of them completely different.
The Hours of the Night won the 1997 Romantic Novel of the Year award, very much to her surprise.
A more recent book, The Mysteries of Glass, is a serious and deeply moving story about a Victorian curate, and it reads like a Victorian novel.
Now we have something very much of today; the style is wry and sometimes ironic, and with the authorial voice very much in evidence – “Meanwhile, in a rented flat at the other side of the city…” sort of thing.
It works wonderfully, because running through the irony is compassion.
The book is about love: married love, hopeless love, obsessional love – most heart-breaking of all, the love of an eccentric old woman for her dog.
This extraordinary stylistic versatility is certainly tied up with Sue Gee’s academic life.
For 12 years she taught writing skills to undergraduates at Middlesex University, and she is now programme leader there for the MA Writing Programme.
Language, and in particular the English language, is her passion – witness the occasional digs at what she sees as its deterioration.
What she feels and cares about are reflected in the voices of her two main characters: Dido and Georgia, now aged 60, met at university, and had busy academic careers.
They have happy marriages and attractive grown-up children, they love books and gardens, Radio 4 and old friends, and they are all set for a richly fulfilling retirement.
Then things start to happen.
Out of the blue, Georgia’s beloved husband dies. The depiction of her pain is terribly real. Two years ago, Sue Gee’s husband died. He was not yet 53. “I thought I’d go first. He was the bravest man on earth. Losing him was hell. It still is.”
The book cannot help but be personal; Georgia even lives in Highbury Fields, where Sue Gee herself lives.
But, she says, “Georgia is not me. There are huge differences. And I did not want to write about a widow who meets a lovely man and lives happily ever after.”
This is not a romantic novel, even though it is about love.
It is quirky and sometimes acerbic, and celebrates unfashionable things such as reading; all the characters “read in bed”, except poor dyslexic Chloe, the outsider from all this reading.
“I have enormous sympathy for Chloe, but I had to be true to my subject, which is about getting older. It is not a women’s book, but it is about women’s experience – and a celebration of women of a certain age.” |
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