May 2011: The Hand That First Held Mine

When the bohemian, sophisticated Innes Kent turns up by chance on her doorstep, Lexie Sinclair realises she cannot wait any longer for her life to begin, and leaves for London.  There, at the heart of the 1950s Soho art scene, she carves out a new life for herself, with Innes at her side.  In the present day, Elina and Ted are reeling from the difficult birth of their first child.  Elina, a painter, struggles to reconcile the demands of motherhood with sense of herself as an artist, and Ted is disturbed by memories of his own childhood, memories that don’t tally with his parents’ version of events. As Ted begins to search for answers, so an extraordinary portrait of two women is revealed, separated by fifty years, but connected in ways that neither could ever have expected.

Maggie O’Farrell is the author of five novels, After You’d Gone, My Lover’s Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and The Hand That First Held Mine. Born in Northern Ireland, Maggie grew up in Wales and Scotland. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

And some reviews….

‘O’Farrell has a remarkable ability to convey the texture of human emotion with precision. In THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE, she also demonstrates a masterful gift for storytelling’ (Observer)

‘Like Daphne du Maurier before her, Maggie O’Farrell writes books designed to stir up the female subconscious and bring our most primal fears to the surface… this book will leave your stomach in knots’ (Daily Mail )

‘The journey this novel invites us on is wonderful, involving time travel, heartache, elation, confusion, freedom, nostalgia and art’ (Scotland on Sunday )

‘This story is elegant, poetic and tenderly written. The characters are so well-written you feel as if they are sat next to you, telling you their stories… an entirely encompassing and beautiful read’ (Heat magazine )

‘In this fantastic read, O’Farrell weaves together two stories that couldn’t be more different… Just how they’re connected will keep you guessing till the end’ (Now magazine )

The Verdict

The things we liked: the 50’s setting, the sassy Lexie and the suave Innes (who most people developed a major crush on), a tale of a woman carving out her niche in the world, the sense of place and time,particularly the sense of places being “layered” with previous events and inhabitants, the quality of the writing and the foregrounding of the “realities” of motherhood, so frequently overlooked in novels.

And now the problems: a lot of rather two-dimensional minor characters, a slightly “stagey” feel to the whole book, the omniscient “knowing” narrative voice used throughout the Lexie story(which as dubbed “the voice of doom”) and an over-reliance on fairly unbelievable plot points (Tom’s recall of his childhood? Discovering Jackson Pollock behind the dressing table? Would Curtis of really married Margot???) left most of us with a feeling of short-changed by a book which promised so much. While we almost universally praised the quality and ease of the prose, for me at least, it seems a shame that a writer as so obviously “good” as O’Farrell has produced a novel of such little substance; as Kelly so accurately said “a Mars Bar for the brain”.