ONE of the curious side effects of the feminist movement, surely unintended by all but the most extreme segregationists, has been the ghettoisation of women's literary creativity. This was surely not the purpose of feminism; yet it is what has happened.
When Germaine Greer publishes a new book on whatever currently ails her, she will invariably be interviewed by women journalists, will appear on chat shows accompanied by fellow feminists, and will be treated in a particularly reverential, feminist swaddling way.
An entire class of fiction has come into existence which roughly falls into the feminist swaddling category, particularly if the subject is rape or child abuse. It will be reviewed solely and sympathetically by women. The same women will probably be called on to review any anti feminist outpourings from any intrepid feminist doubting male, with predictably opposite lynch mob results, often exhibiting a contempt which would spell instant and certain death for any man who tried so to speak of a feminist.
Needless to say, this is not good. Needless to say, this is not healthy. But it is not needless to say that the biggest victim of this feminist swaddling are women authors themselves, who come to be perceived as belonging to a class of literature which is not of interest to Real Men, whatever they are. The perception is created - different rules apply here. This book is by a woman, and for women, with maybe a few symnatico new men admitted to the uncritically approving sisterly audience.
Lia Mills's first novel Another Alice looks as if it might be a victim of this intellectual ghettoisation. Predictably it has been given to women to review, as if the primary qualification to review such a book is the correct gender. There can be no finer example of how unproductive this kind of stupid ghettoisation is.
Superb Work
Another Alice is not a fine feminist novel; it not a fine first novel; it is not a fine novel for a female audience; it is not even an extraordinary insight into child abuse; it is simply a superb work of fiction, which happens to be by a woman, which happens to be a first novel which happens in part to be about child abuse.
Poolbeg's fiction list for this year had been closed when Lia tentatively submitted her manuscript for consideration. It was promptly opened again and Another Alice readied for publication. No wonder. For it authentically breaks new ground in fiction. Abuse of female sexuality has been a theme in fiction since Candide, but our knowledge of the consequences of child abuse is recently acquired. (Nor indeed is victimhood fined to the female sex, as many of the priestly scandals of the past year or so have shown.)
Sexual Abuse
I know of no novel which deals with the issue as carefully and as bravely and as profoundly as Another Alice. Its success is due to one primary ingredient. It is not a novel about child abuse. It is a novel about a woman and her relationships with her friends, her mother, her daughter, and even her dog; and the woman happens to have been sexually abused in childhood.
This is the point. She is damaged but she is intact. She will carry through her life the imperfections and the limitations which result from that abuse; but she learns other strengths, acquires fresh wisdoms from those imperfections and limitations. And if this were simply another of those fulsome life enhancing survival novels, of how a woman triumphantly overcomes the damage inflicted on her in infancy, it would be merely a piece of fictional feelgoodery, something to read during a long and dreary plane journey so that you feel better when you arrive.
Another Alice will probably not make you feel simply better when you arrive; it is far too dark and troubling for a straightforward and emotionally simple response. It is a complicated story with complex emotions and instincts at work. But it is an enormously enriching work enriching in the skill in which the doubts and uncertainties of Alice are conveyed as slowly the story of how her infancy was murdered in its infancy is relayed, until we learn in full and terrible measure the wickedness done to her as a child.
This is not done in voyeuristic detail, but in detail sufficiently horrifying, when it comes, to cause you to put the book down in rage and pity; by which time, of course, you are not actually reading a novel but are fully implicated in the characters who have come to inhabit your life and your mind. Offence to them is offence to friends; when we learn of what has been done to Alice, we are as appalled as if she were a real person, rather than the creation of Lia's imagination.
One of the reasons why so many children feel so guilty about the abuse they have suffered is that sometimes it causes them pleasure. This is a difficult thing to say, and exceedingly difficult to deal with sensitively, without providing excuses or justifications to pederasts.
It is a measure of how superbly Lia has dealt with this aspect of the problem that nothing she writes could be adduced as pederasty pandering. Quite the reverse; the unbearably complex emotions which are unleashed by the combination of pain, of degradation, of the frissons of innocent, infantile pleasure are made the more agonising, the torment all the more intractable, by her honesty, The fleeting pleasure is intrinsic to the enduring pain.
Truth Emerges
But most of all, this is a novel about Alice - girl, teenager, woman, mother. Part of her life was about abuse; part of her life was about avoiding the memory of it and the awful rock like certainty that it towered over her childhood, adolescence and adulthood, corrupting her relations with men and overshadowing all she did, until in analysis the truth emerges.
That truth emerges in a novel which is hauntingly, beautifully written. No doubt we are in for an era of abuse novels, but this not does not belong to that genre, or any other. It is sui generis. It stands as a deeply serious and important novel which we finish wiser than when we began: and that defines it as literature.