Eileen Battersby

I was very sorry to learn of the death at Christmas of Irish literary critic, Eileen Battersby. A couple of years ago I reviewed her novel “Teethmarks on my Tongue" for a publication that had doubled-up on reviews so my review did not get published. I'm so sad about that as I really liked her novel. It was quiet and beautifully written. Here's my review now, for your interest, published on my blog.

  

           Eileen Battersby

                                        TEETHMARKS ON MY TONGUE

        395PP. Dalkey Archive Press. UK £13.50

           978 1 62897 147 7

“By the dawn of the 20th century, Europe’s liberties were the liberties denied so many Americans, whether racial, sexual, or gender-specific … for so many artists, Europe came to stand for all that was bohemian”, states Esi Edugyan in her piece for The Guardian about novels in which Americans come to Europe to work out home-grown problems. It is the preoccupation, too, of Eileen Battersby’s debut novel, Teethmarks on My Tongue.

The novel’s protagonist, teenager Helen Stockton Defoe, is a self-confessed “prig”. Obsessed with horses and astrology, she is also vastly more knowledgeable than her peers on matters to do with art and literature (she loves To the Lighthouse, hates A Clockwork Orange – “a vicious little yarn”). After her mother is gunned down in the street by Walt Welter (her mother’s younger lover), Helen is left to grieve and carry on at home with her remote dour father, a respected veterinarian in the town of Richmond, Virginia. When her father adds cruelty to remoteness by selling off a rebellious but beloved stallion, Galileo, a horse with whom she’s just begun to develop a bond, Helen decides to abscond to Paris. There, she rescues an old street-dog, giving him the moniker Hector Berlioz and, after a terrifying episode with Marc, a man she meets in a Parisian bar, escapes to the Loire Valley to take up employment as a rider-cum-stable hand for horse-owner, Monsieur Gallay. Here, in Gallay’s 2000-acre horse-training complex, just outside Amboise, with Hector in tow, Helen settles in well to the motley staff of trainers, jockeys, cooks and stable hands. Allay’s business is rigourous and tough and entirely suited to the novel’s adrift protagonist, providing her with routine and friendships, particularly in the form of the rebellious Lone Star, and Mathieu, with whom Helen falls in love. Months later, Helen leaves Amboise again for Paris. From Gare Du Nord she travels to Germany – East and West – mainly to observe the works of her favourite artist, Caspar David Friedrich. She falls ill during one of these excursions, which, as the denouement unfolds, culminates in a life-changing event.

The prose in this bildungsroman is highly-wrought, clear-eyed, occasionally breathtaking: Helen’s mother’s hand has “the feel of fragile bird-bones”, there is “the shimmy and shift” of one’s own language, and, as the East German guards patrol the border, Helen can “smell their meaty breath” - while “Berlin was alive with its dead”. When Lone Star tries to make friends with Helen after an initial combative period, she circles her “as if she was a nurse attending a patient in remission”.

While this most literary novel is without “genre”, is held together by its precise and detailed style (which is strong and beautiful enough to rescue occasional dips in narrative drive), there is in it a slight nod to the Southern Gothic, or “Southern semi-Gothic” as Helen describes her world in Richmond. For instance, there are frequent references to paintings by the aforementioned German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich; there’s the shuddersome image of Billy-bob climbing into the dead horse Monticello’s grave; the Big (or at least roomy) House trope repeated in Richmond and Amboise; references to the Brothers Grimm, to Helen’s dream of her father wearing a Dracula cape, to her “sadistic impulses”.

Helen is an oftentimes unsympathetic character, but there are a number of characters to enjoy here: the affable surrogate-father figure, Monsieur Gallay, the sparky Lone Star, the sombre but kind-hearted Mathieu. Set in the 1980s, the period is also evoked well: cassettes play ABBA in cars, Checkpoint Charlie remains a dreary emblem of a divided Europe. The story, particularly the Amboise section, is also highly cinematic; the French landscape and weather is keenly evoked, the various dramas of the stable-yards easy to imagine. The passage about the death of Monticello and how the aforementioned Billy-bob (who cared for him) is shattered after the horse’s death, is particularly harrowing. It is to Billy-bob that Helen turns in her mind when she needs to feel grounded, or when the various events that happen to her become unbearable: “I am just like Billy-bob and people like him and me cannot live without our special ones”.

There are also a variety of animals mentioned in the text - stags, horses, cats and dogs, which serves to deepen the sense of alienation Helen feels from the people around her, particularly her father. “How sick I was of humans”, she opines.

By the end of the novel one wonders if its protagonist has matured, faced up to her untreated grief and issues to do with her troubled family life. Perhaps, a little; though the tendency to work out her emotions through external stimuli – paintings, horses, Mathieu, Hector – rather than locating them clearly within herself, remains.

A sort of metafictional summary of the novel is given by Helen in Part One: “a slow, painful business, this act of remembering – so many images observed and words spoken, overheard, the slightest gesture. It all sticks in your mind and weighs you down, even if it ends up making sense”.

This is arts journalist Eileen Battersby’s first novel. It’s a painstaking work of stark beauty and, as publishers Dalkey Archive Press rightly claim, “a most unusual coming-of-age novel”.