Book Review - The Benefactors

Our Editor in Chief reviews Wendy Erskine's debut novel, The Benefactors.

THE BENEFACTORS – Wendy Erskine

Reviewed by Hanna Nielson

Wendy Erskine has decided if you’re going to talk about her, you’re going to talk about what no one wants to talk about: class,  money, justice – and sexual assault. In a smart move, this much-sought-after debut author has decided if you’re going to celebrate her voice, you’re going to wade through working class voices to do it. If you’re going to snatch up her debut because it’s the latest thing, you’re going to face the cycle of injustice and stories that never get told. And it’s going to be a riveting page-turner to boot.

As much as the novel tackles these issues head on, it’s not in the glorified, Hollywood-style dramatization where readers have to endure a lurid blow-by-blow account. It’s smartly handled, with extraneous details recalled in hazy flashbacks, the way real-world traumatic memories are experienced, returning in bits. The assault of a working-class girl by three privileged boys is depicted in bare bones style in procedural reports, and clinical notes. We’re not led by the nose to look down on the victim, Misty and her working-class family. We’re not encouraged to envy the upper-class lifestyle of the boys. There's a fairness in the point of view, letting characters stand and fall by their actions alone.

It's told in a plurality of voices, more or less related to the storyline, and some completely tangential. These are mostly unidentified ‘voices’ that one might hear while out and about in the city, framing Belfast itself as another character in the story.

For full disclosure, I had the privilege of editing Wendy’s work as Editor in Chief for New Isles Press Issue 4, ‘Psychopomp’. Even in a short story written specially for the issue’s theme, her prose and characters and concept were meticulously crafted. This trademark attention to detail, craft, and characterisation is on full display in The Benefactors - and her fans will find much to enjoy.

In the protagonist Misty, we see the courage, and perhaps naivety, it takes to seek justice in a world that’s designed and tailored for men – especially young men with the cliched 'bright futures ahead of them.' As the book describes it: ‘They’re who they are and she’s who she is, and we’ve got all the rest of it, so the odds are against her.’

The second touching portrait is Misty's father, working class taxi driver, Boogie. He’s a tower of support, strength, and stability in their lives when Misty and her sister are abandoned by their wayward mother. Through Boogie’s grandmother, who raised him after he was abandoned by his own wayward mother, we get a glimpse of a rare upside to the Troubles –the days when such injustices were dealt with immediately, by speaking to the right man down the pub.

We’re also given the perspective of the accused boys’ mothers, some of them with secret backstories that could easily shade into Misty’s. Rather than see any commonality with the unfortunate girl, they close ranks to protect their own. Perhaps because they sit upon a knife’s edge of respectability themselves, they cling all the more to their privilege. We get the sense they are also trapped by class, but prefer the shelter afforded by a gilded cage.

The text is spliced with interludes, each in a different voice, some revealing details linked to the main plot, others purely experiential ‘like you might overhear in the hair salon,’ the author explained at a pre-release talk hosted by Lucy Caldwell at the Crescent Arts’ Belfast Book Festival. ‘You’d hear that and not have any context, or know the person who was speaking […] so I didn’t want to give those details.’

One interlude includes a story about a mother who travels to meet her grown son, given up for adoption when she was sixteen – and the shocking results. You get the sense, because of the harsh social mores around female purity and unwed mothers at the time, that the woman was never truly in command of her own body, perhaps in her whole life.

I’ve heard other reviewers compare Erskine’s novel to Dickens and Woolf, and it’s true she blends social conscience and dark humour with a kind of mesmeric panoply of observation and voice. I would add John Dos Passos to the list, specifically his novel Manhattan Transfer, providing a class-conscious portrait of a city through multiple perspectives, as insightful as it is experimental. True to her working-class roots, I’m sure the author would downplay the comparison. But, as one unnamed voice in her novel states: ‘I mean, there’s that thing, what is art but a corner of reality seen through a temperament?’

I’ve seen Belfast change and evolve over the course of 20 years, and to me Erskine’s novel succeeds in presenting another essential piece of the puzzle of its ever-evolving identity. She’s traced a new map atop the old, not to erase the Troubles or the city’s history, but to look upwards and over – and ask, ‘What’s something new that can be said about us?’ And I have no doubt that in years to come, this novel will be an inspiration to future writers – from the North and beyond.

There’s a passage in the book that almost seems to speak to that thought as the heroine Misty speculates: ‘Imagine casting a message in a bottle into the sea. How long would it take before anyone would find it? Probably, with the tides, it might just stay in the same spot for years, moving this way and that, back and forward, but never reaching a shore. And even then, if it did, what were the chances of someone caring about your message? Next to zero? But someone might.’

Many someones might. Here’s hoping.

The Benefactors is available now in all good bookstores.