Grace McCleen’s third novel, The Offering, returns to the territory of her award-winning debut, The Land of Decoration, which announced her in 2012 as a significant talent, drawing praise from the likes of Hilary Mantel and AS Byatt for her assured voice. Her second book, The Professor of Poetry, followed in 2013, and The Offering completes a trio of novels she finished in 2010 since when, according to a recent interview, she has written nothing more.
Her narrator, Madeline Adamson, begins her story from a solitary room in Lethem Park mental infirmary, shortly after what she describes as “an incident” between herself and Dr Lucas, the psychiatrist who has been experimenting with a radical hypnotherapy treatment to uncover the trauma that precipitated Madeline’s admittance to Lethem Park some two decades earlier, at the age of 14. Madeline cannot or will not recall what happened to her on the night she was found wandering along a lonely beach road, covered in blood; nor can she remember what exactly occurred with Dr Lucas to have brought her treatment to such an abrupt end. The narrative that follows is an incremental unfolding of events in past and present, leading to a double revelation. But Lethem Park shares its name with the mythological river in Hades, a bit of symbolism the author has flagged up in an epigraph, lest we miss it; this is a novel about the nature of memory. “Forgetting is the precondition of existence; we forget to stay alive, filter the necessary from the unnecessary, the bearable from that which can’t be borne; whether or not we are aware of it, we leave what we have to the dark,” Madeline observes. (Her own name is also heavy with symbolism in the literature of memory.)
In common with 10-year-old Judith, the narrator of The Land of Decoration, and McCleen herself, Madeline’s childhood has been shaped by the fundamentalist evangelical beliefs of her family, which have led to extreme isolation. As she turns 14, she and her parents move to a farm on a remote island at the insistence of her intractable father, who believes he has been led there by God. To keep her from the influence of unbelievers, Madeline does not attend school, but spends her days roaming the countryside with her dog, Elijah. In her ignorance, she concludes that her tentative sexual awakening is a religious ecstasy. Her connection with nature verges on hallucinatory, communicated in luminous, lyrical descriptions that capture all the intensity of adolescent solipsism.
As Madeline retreats further into that past through the hypnotherapy and the entries in her teenage diary, so her present reality begins to blur and her detached, mocking observations of Lucas and his methods give way to a more agitated voice that winds tighter with expertly controlled tension as it heralds the moment of crisis.
That McCleen is a writer of exceptional gifts is beyond doubt. Her prose can soar in moments of breathtaking beauty, most particularly when she turns a poet’s eye on the landscape, though a minor criticism is that there’s a surfeit of these passages. But she writes equally viscerally about her narrator’s emotional terrain, depicting claustrophobia, shame and terror so painfully it makes your skin itch. The Offering is an immersive and often uncomfortable read, and it is hard not to conclude that its intensity is born of the author’s personal knowledge of aspects of Madeline’s history. But there is such a fluency and authority to her writing that, even if she continues to draw on her own experience, it is to be hoped that she will find there many more stories to tell.
The Offering is published by Sceptre (£17.99). Click here to buy it for £14.39
