I heard small snippets of Burning Bright (1994) when it was serialized on BBC Radio 4 in the 1990s: enough to grab my attention but not to give me an overall impression of the book’s shape or a reliable sense of its themes. I vaguely intended to read the novel but I didn’t come across a copy till earlier this year, almost 30 years later. I had bought a copy of another of Dunmore’s novels, The Siege (2001) in the early 2000s for a book group, but couldn’t bring myself to read a story in which the inhabitants of a besieged city were starved and frozen during a Baltic winter. I finally got around to reading The Siege recently, only after I’d read Burning Bright. I’m not going to write about The Siege in this post because so far I’ve read it just once and I prefer to reread any book that I’m going to comment on. The only other work by Dunmore that I’ve read is her first collection of short stories, Love of Fat Men (1997), which I’m now rereading. In other words, I’m familiar with no more than a small portion of Dunmore’s fiction: she wrote 15 novels for adults and three short story collections, as well as poetry and novels for children and young adults. I intend to read more of her work before too long but it’s not easy to know where to start.

Burning Bright tells the intertwined stories of two women, two generations apart. Nadine is 16 though in most context she claims to be 19. She used to do well at school, but something changed.

Have a nice life, Nadine Light, eight GCSEs taken a year early, one of our high-flyers. Nadine Light, half-way through her A-level course when she suddenly stopped being able to read. But they didn’t know that. Only the essays coming in late and the coursework not done and the lessons missed. Nadine Light standing in the staff-room, face sullen, averted. A disappointment. “After all we’ve done for you,” said their eyes. “Not university material” said the headmistress’s report … Five years on an assisted place and nothing to show for it. (pp. 21–2)

Her parents have sold their house and moved to Germany with her handicapped sister, Lulu, to a Centre where Lulu will receive “Conductive education: repatterning, intensive speech therapy, hydrotherapy, music therapy, art therapy” (p. 23). Nadine’s and Lulu’s mother explains:

“We’ve got to think of Lulu now. This might be her chance.” (p. 40)

Nadine has had her turn. (Though as Nadine sees it, her sister has always had first claim on their parents’ — particularly their mother’s — attention.)

As the rest of her family has moved to Germany, Nadine has taken up with Kai Toivanen, a man twice her age. When Kai and his business partner, Tony, buy a run-down house in (I think) Bristol or maybe Bath — the train there goes from Paddington — she and Kai move in and set up their home there. Squatters (including Jenny, the mother of a baby) have been intimidated into leaving but there remains a sitting tenant who can’t be legally evicted. This is Enid, an elderly woman who lives on the top floor and whose room has the only surviving door-knob in the house.

Tony and Kai find Enid a disgusting nuisance but Nadine likes her and gets on well with her. You’ll notice that Nadine’s name contains Enid’s backwards, perhaps suggesting that their lives are lived in parallel but in opposite directions, with Nadine’s extending beyond the older woman’s. Enid tells Nadine that in the late 1930s, just before the Second World War, she had a chance encounter with a woman named Sukey, who introduced her to the Millicent Sowerby Association for Ladies, more familiarly known as Manchester Ladies. Sukey had an apparently aristocratic husband who, since she provided him with an heir (though not a spare), mostly left her alone to go her own way. Enid became her lover and found the experience, and the premises occupied by the Manchester Ladies, opened her eyes to possible ways of living that she hadn’t been aware of before. But Sukey already had another lover, Caro, who was jealous of the developing relationship with Enid and eventually stove Sukey’s skull in with a poker, then spent 20 years in prison as a result. (Whenever I encounter a character named Caro, I always wonder if the name is meant to suggest flesh. In this case, given Dunmore’s play on the names Enid and Nadine, I suspect it is, though I’m not at all confident that I can explain the significance.)

At first, Enid tells Nadine only the first part of this tale, wanting the young woman to understand how much Sukey’s energy impressed her and helped her to develop her own personality. She doesn’t want to tell her the violent end, though. Eventually she finishes the story while Nadine is asleep.

Nadine is aware that Kai carries large amounts of cash, some of it in new £50 notes. As he and Tony talk a lot about property and have bought the house that they are partly occupying, she believes that their income comes from property dealing, but in fact they’re pimps. They have plans for Nadine — they agree it’s time she started to pay her way — but they don’t intend to put her on the streets: she’s too “classy” (p. 20) and potentially valuable for that. They have a particular client up for her.

He is Paul Parrett, now a powerful Government minister and formerly a successful (and as a result very wealthy) businessman. Paul was a wartime “GI baby” (p. 9), adopted by a woman he came to hate. By the time his birth-mother knew he was on the way, his biological father had been shipped abroad.

His adoptive mother never disclosed to the adoption society that the reason she had not been able to have a child herself was that she had never slept with her husband in fifteen years of marriage. Mr Parrett said nothing and died two years after Paul was adopted. Her dislike of sex extended to those who practised it and to those who were obviously the result of it. Paul was clearly in the second category, as the product of sex which must have been undertaken for pleasure rather than endured for the satisfaction of a wedding ring. Such an attitude was inconceivable to Mrs Parrett. She foretold bad blood. (pp. 9–10)

The upshot of this upbringing is that the adult Paul is able to get off only by being humiliated. His sexual needs are specialized and, as he puts it himself, “unfriendly. There was nothing in them for anyone else, except money” (p. 11). So he has accepted early on that sex is something that he will always have to pay for, that he’ll have to deal through intermediaries, and that the onus will be on him to judge carefully the risks that he’ll be undertaking.

Tony takes Nadine to London to go to dinner with Paul Parrett. She is wearing an extraordinary silk dress that Kai bought and that looks perfect on her. After dinner, she and Paul go back to his apartment for coffee and Tony makes himself scarce. Paul lives on the top floor of a fifteen-floor new building. He has a rooftop garden high above the city where he grows, among other things, strawberries and apple trees:

Sheltered by the low hedges there are six big tubs with branchless apple trees growing in them, like fruiting poles. Immature apples cluster on the stems in bunches of six or seven.

“Ballerina,” says Paul Perrett, but the trees have no grace. They are maimed ballerinas with their limbs chopped off. He looks at them with satisfaction. (p. 166)

Tony hasn’t prepared Nadine for her enounter with Paul: he hasn’t told her what to expect or the nature of the transaction. She likes Paul but isn’t able to provide what he requires, which is that she should strap him securely to his bed and then masturbate herself while he looks sideways on, “so I can just see you if I turn my head” (p. 162). Nadine tells him that she doesn’t masturbate.

Notwithstanding the frustration of his expectations, Paul is not angry — apparently not even with Tony, whom he describes as a “fucking idiot” but “not worth wasting time on” (p. 164). The government minister who has made a fortune in business turns out not to be quite the monster that the stereotype leads us to expect, though neither is he wholly without fault. He’s solicitous of Nadine, giving her a private phone number where she can contact him if she needs help, and having his driver take her to Paddington so she can get the late train home. Tony has booked both of them into a hotel but Nadine decides to go straight back to the house, a decision leading to further complications, culminating in an attack by Kai on Enid, in which she falls downstairs and appears to be dead.

Believing that he has killed Enid, Kai moves her “body” to hide it from Nadine. Once Nadine has left the house, he moves it back to where it had fallen. He tells Nadine that they are moving to Finland, back to his home country. She is happy to go along with that, though by now, at Enid’s prompting, she has realized not only that Tony tried to pimp her out, but that Kai was on board with this.

In Finland, Kai and Nadine live in a holiday home belonging to former friends of Kai’s with whom he hasn’t been in contact for years. It’s in the sparsely populated north of the country, surrounded by forests and lakes. There Kai lapses into depression and heavy drinking while Nadine explores the forests on a new, expensive mountain bike that he’s bought her, and swims in the lake beside the summer-house.

After some weeks, Kai explains to Nadine why he’s drinking so much: he confesses to having killed Enid. Nadine immediately flees on her mountain bike, heading for the nearest town, which is 25 miles (40 Km) away. She has hidden the car keys so that Kai, who in any case is too drunk to drive, can’t immediately follow her. She thought about throwing the keys away but realized that, without transport, Kai was likely to die in the remote forest.

As she nears the town and its railway station, Nadine, flagging, comes across a lake in the forest. It’s now late autumn and very cold. In a remarkable episode, Nadine pauses to go for a swim in the lake.

Kai has told her not to bathe anywhere unless she knows the water. Some of these lakes are very deep. She should never swim alone. There’s always the risk of cramp and sudden exhaustion from cold. Kai could be very protective. (p. 242)

Some of the lakes are reputedly a thousand feet deep and contain huge pike, “fresh-water sharks” (p. 243), but she thinks that the water she is swimming in is too clear for them. The pike prefer murk. With her return to shore blocked by a family of swans who would attack her if she got too close, she is compelled to swim right across the lake — really no further than if she had swum back from the middle, but psychologically more forbidding — and climb out onto a large crag, which seems both to impede and aid her exit: she cuts her hip on its sharp edge when she is washed against it, but finds that there are ledges in the rock that she can traverse. She then has to walk back around the lake, skirting some marshland at its edge, to where she left her clothes and bicycle. The swimming episode suggests that Nadine is at home in an element very different from that which hosts Kai, Tony and their associates.

Back in England, Nadine goes to the house, where Tony tells her that Enid is in hospital. He had found her, realized that she was still alive and called an ambulance. Nadine visits Enid every day. She intends to get a job and rent a flat, where she wants Enid to come and live with her. She phones Paul Parrett, who is interested in what has happened to Enid. He asks Nadine what she looks like, which Nadine takes to be an enquiry as to how Kai’s attack affected her. She answers:

“Oh, well, pale. But you’d expect that. Her arm’s in a sling.” (p. 259)

Paul has already asked Nadine about Enid’s appearance (and her age) the night she was in his apartment, when she first told him about her older friend. On first reading (and, I’ll admit, on second) I assumed that either Paul was in the habit of enquiring about any elderly woman who had given up a wartime baby for adoption, or that he had decided that Enid would fit the bill as someone who might have been his birth-mother. But this is what I had overlooked, from Paul’s first appearance early in the story:

His mother is alive, he knows. He has checked it. One of the advantages of a ministerial position is that all sorts of small barriers fall away. The social security system is usefully comprehensive, and old people live a long time these days. She is in receipt of a supplementary pension, and she lives alone in rented accommodation. He has never seen her. (p. 9)

So, as soon as Nadine mentions Enid’s surname (“Shelton”, p. 168), he is sure that she is his direct link to his mother. This largely explains his unexpectedly friendly interest in the young woman he had shortly before been prepared to exploit as a prostitute.

Helen Dunmore was a poet before she started to write fiction. Several times in this book, and in some of the short stories in Love of Fat Men, we find a phrase or clause that reads like a line of poetry. One example is the phrase I’ve chosen as the title of this post (p. 244), which is in iambic pentameter. Another is “the use of an official car for unofficial business” (p. 11) — iambic heptameter, ending in an extra unstressed syllable. There are other examples which, while not actually metrical have a rhythm which suggests poetry. And a section of one of the short stories, “Family Meetings”, ends with this, a complete paragraph:

White cakes that set her mother’s teeth on edge. (Love of Fat Men, p. 121)

Dunmore is also sensitive to smells and textures. As here:

New banknotes are just as fresh and moist as cigarettes. She eases them over the lip of the pocket. The money is dense but pliable, and surprisingly heavy. The band around the notes is unbroken and it’s too tight for her to slip them out or fan the edges of the notes and count them without the risk of the band tearing. Then he’ll know she’s been in his pockets. The notes smell of new books with a touch of metal. (p. 34)

Or here, where Tony tries some home cooking with one of the sharp new knives he’s bought:

He dries the knife on a paper towel, then he unrolls the veal, flattens it with the back of the knife and begins rapidly to slice it into fine, almost translucent ribbons of flesh. The meat is nearly bloodless. It doesn’t look like flesh at all. Her mother would never have veal in the house, because it was cruel. Nadine watches the small muscles moving in Tony’s forearms as veal ribbons peel away beautifully from one another, then spread out fanwise on the board. They look like the gills of oyster mushrooms. Certainly this meat doesn’t look as if it was ever part of anything as warm and sweet-smelling as a calf. (p. 55)

In each of these examples the olfactory detail is brought in just at the end of the description, very simply, just enough to pervade the reader’s sense of what is going on.

As I mentioned already, I’m now rereading the stories in Dunmore’s first short story collection. I expect to write about them, and quite possibly other work by her, before too long.

Edition: Penguin paperback, 1995.