THE BUTTERFLY CABINET - reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

There was a point in Frank McCourt’s bestselling Angela’s Ashes when I had to put the book down because I couldn’t have borne it if one more baby had died. I felt similarly about this novel as the sadnesses were mounting up but what kept me hooked into The Butterfly Cabinet by Bernie McGill (Headline, $36.95) was the easy, fluid writing, the vibrant voices of the two main characters and the secrets that are slowly revealed about them.

Set in Ireland in 1892 and 1968, this is a story about how we are rarely what we seem to be. Maddie McGlade is living in a rest home that was once the grand country house where as a young girl she worked as a servant. The mistress, she tells us, was a hard woman and fond of meting out cruel punishments to both her staff and her large brood of children. Now the possessor of her old butterfly cabinet, Maddie has discovered hidden in it the diary her mistress Harriet Ormond kept while incarcerated in prison for the manslaughter of her only daughter Charlotte. It is this journal that forms the second strand of the story.

To begin with it all seems utterly black and white; Harriet the child-killer is cruelty personified and Maddie the beloved one. But first impressions are misleading and in fact there are endless shades of grey. Maddie has a story to tell before she dies and secrets to unburden, Harriet’s journal reveals the truth is far more complex than it first appears.

I think McGill’s real triumph with this novel is how successfully she manipulates the way we feel about her two main characters. As we come to know Harriet we cannot help but find sympathy for her – unfavoured as a child, happiest galloping down the beach on her horse, overwhelmed by nine children and her role as a homemaker, misunderstood by society in general, crippled by her position and her pride; it is no surprise that tragedy finds her.  And as we come to know of Maddie’s duplicity and her own role in the little girl’s death, our opinion shifts again.

Although the characters themselves are fictional, the story is loosely based on real events that took place in McGill’s hometown of Portstewart, Ireland in the late 1800s when a little girl called Mary Helen Montagu was found asphyxiated at her family home Cromore House and her mother, accused of cruelty to children by her servants, was found guilty of manslaughter and jailed for 12 months. What McGill has done is used a novelist’s license to fill in the gaps and try to explain why such a thing might have come about.

McGill (right) is a playwright and it’s difficult to believe this is her debut as a novelist because the prose is so elegant and assured. Take this passage with Harriet telling of her passion for her husband Edward and where inevitably it leads: “How can I describe the way I am with him when we are alone together? It has something to do with touch, and something to do with ache, and something to do with living, and something to do with freedom, and something to do with loss, and something to do with a return to oneself…and with colour, startling colour and with harmony, and with rhythm and with abandon. A thrumming of parts, a butterflying, a dancing. And at the end of it, often, there is a child. It is a price to pay.”

Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino is a succcesful Auckland-based author of popular fiction, The Italian Wedding was published in May 2009, Recipe for Lifewas published in April, 2010, while her latestThe Villa Girls, was published in April this year.

She is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 3 July, 2011 as was the Booklover column below:

Booklover

Owen Marshall is one of New Zealand’s leading fiction writers whose latest novel is The Larnachs (Vintage, $39.99).

The book I love most is….............Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen. Some of us who have always admired Austen's work, struggle to suppress pique at the mass of come lately and casual fans gathered by film and television at considerable remove from the books.  But I must put up my hand with all the others.  What epigrammatic wit and exact turn of phrase, what wry and penetrating insight into human nature, what a detailed and compelling vision of a way of living long gone.  How well her work has stood the test of time, while many of the famous Victorian writers who followed her are now almost unreadable.

The book I'm reading right now is…............Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl by Donald Sturrock.  A substantial 655 page account of the hugely successful, but flawed, children's writer. As Dahl rewrote and retold his rich personal history with imaginative gusto, biographers have a difficult task separating fact from fiction, but it makes for interesting reading.

The book I'd like to read next is…............. Vincent O'Sullivan's new book of poetry, and any new fiction by William Trevor, Alice Munro, or Annie Proulx.

My favourite bookshop is…........ Unity Books in Wellington.  It has a rich selection, an explicable layout, a welcoming literary milieu and, best of all, a staff who cherish the product and are knowledgeable concerning it.  I like also that poetry is abundant and prominently displayed close to the entrance, not hidden in the lowest rack at the back of the shop.

The book that changed me…I can think of no book that was life changing, but I do recall real pleasure and admiration when, as a university student, I came across the work of the English writer H.E. Bates.  He had an infectious love of landscape and provincial life, and a compassionate but clear eyed  understanding of the complexity of human motives and character. The contemporary novel that most impresses me is Ian McEwan's Enduring Love.

The book I wish I'd never read is….......  Literary merit is notoriously subjective, and every book is someone's baby, however sickly.  I don't wish to publicly record those I have flung against the wall.