The full review appears below. I encourage all my followers to read this excellent work.
An awesome silence: is it golden or guilt?
‘Memory
believes before knowing remembers.’ William Faulkner’s dicho is apposite to the
interwoven family tapestry worked impressively by Catherine MacLeod in
Daisychains of Silence. The novel echoes any number of North American authors
who use the patchwork quilt as a metaphor for the collage of life’s incidents
and images. But here the metaphor of silken threads is subtler, more
discerning, in the way the protagonist Deirdre/Daisy picks her way through the
scenes of childhood bullying, adolescent abuse, and womanly betrayal.
Eventually one comes to realise that Daisy, her adopted name, is indeed a
whole, a complete person in her nature, whereas Deirdre, her given name, is
forever a child nurtured to ill effect by her circumstances.
Set
in the recent past and a generation earlier, the novel is at one and the same
time a coming of age story, with unexpected surprises and a catalogue of
unforeseen disasters that tempt the reader into visualising an inescapable descent
into paranoia, and a redemptive coming to maturity saga, albeit with many
questions still unanswered. There is an endearing, prophylactic innocence that
shields the wilful Daisy from undue harm and yet, simultaneously, precipitates
her into the arms of a parental struggle and sexual encounters, from the
insidious and violent, to the needy and tender.
Initially
the quiet retrospection of the adult Daisy attempts to come to terms with her
mother’s forgetfulness, seemingly as contrived as pathological. The discovery
of a hoard of realia from their past opens portals of discovery and
self-knowledge which twist and turn in their elusiveness. Her memory is stirred
to provide the reader with exquisitely drawn picture postcards from her past: early
life in an idyllic rural Scotland; the horror of dorm life in a girls’ private
school; the encounter with her father’s other woman; her first heterosexual
love. As this young life evolves, the damage done by psychologically powerful
characters brings to Daisy the unwanted attribute of, literally, an accident
waiting to happen. Several accidents, perchance.
Her
adolescent response is to secure her mouth in a punk-like, threaded daisychain
pattern, a self-silenced Papageno who has come up empty chasing the bright
birds of her youth. Although the reader appreciates her more voluble later
self, Daisy’s silent quest for knowledge, sifting through the epistolary
threads of her family life, leads her into a series of doubts that shakes her
to the core of her being. Is her mother a murderer; is her partner a confirmed
adulterer?
Characters
in the novel are portrayed beautifully in depth by the writer. There is an
emphasis on close-ups either through the eyes of the protagonist or from the
viewpoint of her tormentors or supporters. This gives a sense of wonderment in
the eye of the beholder. Daisy doesn’t do much or react to much in medium or
long shot. This element enhances the confusion her younger self falls foul of
and her latter day self is prone to. Exquisitely managed shocks to the
trajectory of her life and indeed to the assumptions of the reader lend an
intriguing mystery to the story that unfolds.
The result is an uneasy attachment to and admiration for Daisy that demands
the outcome of her quest for the truth.
The
way the emergent characters end the novel, aspiring daughter, faithful friend,
forgiven partner, secret half-brother-in-law, suggests that Daisy has more than
a few chapters more of self-discovery in what could be a very entertaining
sequel. For now it is a pleasure to return to the family secrets in which as a
child and youth she participates, and as an adult uncovers. Catherine MacLeod’s
achievement is a rich embroidery of interwoven threads that stimulates thought,
provokes consternation, and delivers surprise, shock and enlightenment at what
lies beneath a dystopian family breakdown mirrored one generation after another.
The book is a triumph of literary crossover fiction inspiring both young women
of today and their maturer counterparts.
