Motherhood can bring out the worst in a woman. This uncomfortable truth glitters like broken glass throughout Lisa Harding’s compelling novel about an alcoholic actress.
Bright Burning Things opens like a thriller. A woman frolics with her four-year-old son and shaggy black dog in the sea. The family appears charmingly disinhibited, the mother, Sonya, swimming in bra and pants, registering her sensations in a choppy, canny, voice. Thrilled to a fever pitch by her son’s hand in hers and something that she calls her imp, which could be alcohol, mental illness or artistic genius, she surges through salty water. There’s a hint of Sonya’s old, applauded role as Juliet in her euphoria at “the sunlight refracted like so many stars”.
Then a stranger, a well-meaning older woman, picks up Sonya’s boy, Tommy. He’s been left in the shallows, we now see, dirty, underfed, visibly tense. As the other woman proffers a towel and tries to phone for help, Sonya calls her a kiddy twiddler, a witch, bitch, crone. Little by little, with inexorable rapidity, we sense that all is not well.
Sonya was once told she could never play a mother by a casting director, being too “angular and febrile”. If, sometimes, her incessant brightness and Tommy’s weirdly insightful baby-talk feel forced, so is the mothering role played by women in real life – and its accompanying demand for beatific self-sacrifice.
Therapy-land can feel cliched, but Harding uses Sonya's clever, sweating grip on sanity to keep us guessing
Trapped, when she’s not blacked out, behind a dazzling show of playtimes and glitterpaint, Sonya foists adult appellations on Tommy: “Mr T”, “Mister Man”. It’s the kind of performance we see in insecure men, too – Sonya’s type of bloke, unfortunately – who address male toddlers as “soldier” and hide behind a show of masculinity. As Harding shows, this fake cheer is intrinsic to society’s deification of the family; and its destructiveness is not particular to outcasts.
When a neighbour in the pay of her estranged father threatens to report Tommy’s condition to the police, Sonya must clean up at a rehabilitation centre or lose her son. Therapy-land can feel cliched, but Harding uses Sonya’s clever, sweating grip on sanity to keep us guessing. Nuns and fellow patients come under her swerving eye, yet we cannot trust her to succeed. She probes character shrewdly yet slops into base instincts (“something about him tells me he’s not a father… he has an aura of self-regard…How I’d like to see him out of control”).
We fear the worst when Sonya falls in lust with David, her apparently grounded counsellor who appeases her father’s need for an upright chap in tailored slacks, and Tommy is placed in foster care. She’s broken the rules: she can never make good, now.
But Harding seamlessly excavates our superficial notions of goodness. There are clues, glowing like recently fired shrapnel in Sonya’s memories – ex-lovers, speeding cars, lost keys – that Sonya was drinking before she had Tommy, but it’s motherhood that’s broken her. Little Tommy isn’t impressed by the huge, gaudy statue of Mother Mary when he finally visits his mother in rehab. It’s not he who needs a massive maternal edifice but Sonya, whose mother died when Sonya was a child, in circumstances that grow increasingly mysterious.
I might have liked the book even more had Harding poked at motherhood without giving Sonya a problematic family past. The altered state of parenthood, a high as dizzying as alcohol, is too rarely discussed. We all need something bigger than ourselves. Parents of younger children can find themselves locked in a lonely, irreducible passion.
Harding brilliantly delineates Sonya’s clinging to Tommy, “craving” his heartbeat against her, hiding inside him. The addict’s story becomes a metaphor for the motherly desire to “feel wanted, feel needed …. This is the one place in the whole world where I now hold any power.”
Traversing Sonya's emotional magma, she peers into the core of maternal love as a mania for power
As it was for Hemingway, a drinker’s disarticulation can be both gift and challenge to the storyteller. Plummeting, one glimpses oneself coldly, like watching ourselves drowning. But when Harding too explicitly analyses Sonya’s firecracker opinions, it jolts her otherwise fluid first-person narration – such as when Sonya watches herself looking at her son, “filtered through the lens of the melancholic boozer’s eye” .
Sonya’s artistic impulses may be middle-class but Harding uses them to dismantle the universal altar of motherhood. Traversing Sonya’s emotional magma, she peers into the core of maternal love as a mania for power: “finally I have stepped into the role of the director, or even better, the writer and the characters are mine to do with what I want”.
Harding retains, to the end, those ambiguities that made Sonya a stellar performer of the broken women of Ibsen and Chekov. By refusing to finally “solve” Sonya, she boldly exposes those hypocrisies of the chattering classes that create manipulative mothers and destroy childhoods.
