Sense and Memory

Reading Helen Dunmore is like sitting down to a feast. The flavors are intoxicating, her sensuous prose enveloping, the complexity of the stories just enough to make you want more. Indeed, food and eating are important to Dunmore’s characters, as is the sea--an unpredictable and potentially dangerous element and a metaphor for those human characteristics.

Dunmore was the first recipient of the Orange Prize (for fiction by a woman) in Britain for her third novel, “A Spell of Winter,” in 1996. Her two subsequent novels, “Talking to the Dead” and “Your Blue-Eyed Boy,” now available in the United States, will strengthen her reputation. “Talking to the Dead,” the more compelling of the latest books, tells the story of two sisters whose lives are haunted by the death of an infant brother. Nina, the younger sibling, is a photographer who lives in London. She goes to stay with Isabel, who has suffered a complicated childbirth and emergency hysterectomy. Although Isabel’s husband, Richard, has always been dismissive of Nina (“Richard makes me feel that I am clumsy most of the time”), he grudgingly asks her to come and help out. At first, Nina’s love for Isabel is of a suffocating intensity that approaches idolatry. The living room of Isabel’s cottage “seems entirely beautiful, in the same way as my sister seems entirely beautiful.” Isabel embodies a serene effortless beauty in stark contrast to the awkwardness Nina has always felt. Isabel lives in a rambling cottage and nurtures a large garden full of trees, shrubs, flowers and carefully constructed paths, whereas Nina inhabits a seemingly sterile “white-walled attic flat” in the city.

Nina worries for her sister’s health and for the baby boy whose birth has inspired vivid childhood memories. Their younger brother, Colin, was said to have died of crib death at three months, and Nina is beset by images of the infant and of the moment when they found him dead. As scenes of early childhood are replayed, a stronger, more cunning Isabel comes into focus, and Nina starts to question the circumstances of Colin’s death. Her concentrated love for her sister begins to cleave into more complex feelings of pain, rivalry and something bordering on hatred.

These kinds of revelations are nothing new, but Dunmore makes the transition palpable. As Isabel, Nina, Richard, the nanny and Edward, Isabel’s devoted gay friend who is waiting out a lover’s quarrel, circle around the baby and each other, the temperature rises like the record-breaking summer heat that crawls up the very walls as the day progresses. “It’s been hot enough for mirages, for rivers walking upside down,” and in the garden Nina sees “a tree with red fruit on it that seems to drip down the stone of the wall.”

But before it all turns sour, Nina falls in with the others to help Isabel and devises a sumptuous meal. Eating, as Dunmore points out in the early pages, is something you do after funerals “to prove you’re still alive.” Here, the characters do it as a palliative; later on Isabel plans a grand dinner as a sort of mask of normalcy. As Nina contemplates the first well-intentioned meal, words are enough to prompt saliva:

“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. No one taste should be stronger than another.”

There are many tastes to savor while the communal goodwill erodes: sibling love and resentment, the disappointment of a sexless marriage, the excitement and tension of sexual betrayal, the rancor of those incensed by disloyalty. Edward catches Nina and Richard making love in the garden, and the nanny thinks the baby is being underfed by his distracted mother. Richard finds himself an unnecessary household ornament. Nina indulges him in his unhappiness and gives herself the consolation of his attention while facing the disturbing truth about the veneer of devotion she and Isabel have maintained.

Sense is tied to memory, but Dunmore’s characters don’t dip in and out of their recollections like painters testing color. They are more like people being pulled under water and emerging, opening their eyes a little wider with each dunk to understand the world of the past that exists beneath the veil of the present.

In her latest novel, “Your Blue-Eyed Boy,” Dunmore employs this method to achieve a similarly layered effect with the story of a middle-aged woman who is also haunted, this time physically, by a figure from her past. Thirty-eight-year-old Simone has recently been made a district magistrate (low-level judge) after her husband’s architecture firm has gone bankrupt. Saddled with huge debts, she takes the job and moves her husband and two children to a barren seaside suburb where house prices are low. Simone’s life is already fraught when she starts receiving eerie letters containing nude photographs of herself from a lover she left 20 years ago in America.

Scenes of a young Simone hypnotized and slightly terrified by her American boyfriend, Michael, a troubled Vietnam vet, begin to interrupt the routine of working mother and bitter (mostly family) court sessions. Though Simone’s current life is no party, her instinct to protect her two young sons rises up animal-like at the thought of someone taking away what little security they have.

The prologue presents the threat in storm-tossed words: “When blackmail comes tapping at the door, get up and open it. There’ll be no one there. Just the yawn of a black night with wind in it but no stars. Already there’s wind hurrying through the house, licking the back of your knees as you stare out. . . . Already the curtains are whipping up, the doors are buckling, and the floorboards pitch and toss like the planks of a boat.”

The memories of the summer Simone spent before college on the Massachusetts coast with the ponderous, tortured but gentle 28-year-old Michael are mostly bittersweet, so that it becomes clear that this blackmail is the emotional kind, which makes “Your Blue-Eyed Boy” a story of self-discovery rather than survival, of youth versus adulthood instead of pursuer versus victim.

The book ends, as “Talking to the Dead” does, with a scene of perhaps too-high drama--in bad weather at water’s edge. Elsewhere, Dunmore demonstrates a gift for manipulating the elements and drawing the uncontrollable into a tight rein of poetic prose. The stories, too, are controlled; sensational things, like blackmail, Isabel’s eating disorder and Michael’s perversions, are kept well within the bounds of realistic human frailty. However, though her first-person narrators deliver captivating monologues, they are often frustratingly self-absorbed, and their preoccupations are too selfish to draw a full measure of sympathy. And yet, having entered the richly evocative world Dunmore has conjured, one cannot come away without having tasted an uncommonly satisfying tale.

Richard Eder is on vacation.