Isobel Shirlaw (2024) A Proper Mother.

I’ve a signed copy of Isobel Shirlaw’s, A Proper Mother, and twice heard her read the beginning of her debut novel. But as we know, hearing is not the same as listening. Meeting her on the page offers greater understanding.

Story structure is current and counter-current, much like the watery desert that is the Black Sea. Is, was, and ever shall be.

‘Before’

‘August 1974.’

‘On the last day of their honeymoon they thought they’d check out Agios Ionnis. Frankie had read in the guide book that although the cove was charming, tourist hardly ever went there…’

Before the fall. Frankie is newly married to Callum. They are in love. This is her story, rather than his. Although the narrator allows point-of-view shifts toward their first son John and Michael.

‘The past beats inside me like a second heart, ’John Banville, The Sea (2005).

In Frankie’s case, the second heart is Michael. There have been premonitions that he is special. A palm reading on her honeymoon, and a coffee-cup reading, twenty years later, warning of a great void. The Archangel Michael leads God’s army against the forces of evil.

Michael’s childish nightmare of flames and fire. Voices inside his head that are not his own. His uncanny gift to make music. Biblical monomania.

Yeh, he’s probably autistic or on the spectrum. That was my thinking. But is he dangerous? That’s the question that haunts the book. And in what ways?

Possession has many connotations. Callum, for example, in marrying Frances thinks of her as his possession. His children part of his estate in the same way as his shotgun and sheepdog and rundown English farm.

If the narcissistic psychopathic rapist Donald J. Trump had married Kamala Harris and taken her to his run-down ranch in the Deep South, a proper woman would know her place. Somewhere in value above the chickens but below the prize bullock.

Femicide.

Callum does not gracefully accept Frankie leaving him with his children.

The currents that shape the future.  William Shakespeare, The Tempest.

 ‘What’s past is prologue.’

Frankie’s fate, is it written before the first page? What of her children? Read on.

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