Helen Dunmore is a writer who has been in my reading periphery for a long time now, and I’m not really sure why I have left it so long to read one of her adult novels. Still, I’m glad I started with Talking to the Dead, and I will definitely be reading more of Dunmore’s books in the future.

The plot of the novel, on the surface, seems a very simple one; Isabel has just had a baby, but there have been complications, and Nina, her younger sister, has come to lend a hand. What happens from there, however, is far from simple. Longstanding sibling rivalry casts its shadow over events, and a tragic event from their family past, brought to the fore by the birth of Isabel’s son, comes to haunt both sisters, with terrible consequences. Throw into the mix adultery, mental illness, and a possible murder, and, in the hands of a lesser writer, you would have the making of a fine melodrama, but Helen Dunmore takes this admittedly melodramatic material, and makes it into a novel of terrible beauty.

The subtlety of the writing in Talking to the Dead is masterful, and Nina, as the narrator, points out the vagaries of memory, something that is central to the story, and provides much of the suspense within the plot; Nina herself proves to be an unreliable narrator on several occasions. Dunmore is also clearly interested in how people can have different versions of the truth; still, although there are many times where one character would seem to be lying, it is up to the reader to decide who is telling the truth, and, I have to say, I privileged Nina’s version of events because she was so ready to admit to that tremulous nature of the truth.

Almost as soon as Nina arrives at her sister’s cottage, she is forced to face up to other people’s versions of the truth, as she discovers that her sister has been lying to her about the baby’s conception;

It was an accident, she said, her lids half-closed, smiling slightly. She sounded unworried, but cool, and of course I believed her. I’m in the habit of believing Isabel’s version. It was as deliberate a composition as a photograph of a begging child, alone on a barren street, carefully angled to exclude the mother three yards away.

What is so skillful about these passages, of course, is the warning to the reader not to take everything at face value, something which is very important in Talking to the Dead. Nevertheless, I have to say that I seemed to have forgotten this by the end of the book, which is why the twist in the end completely took me by surprise; I literally had to read the last few pages to make sure I had understood what I had just read. Perhaps I was being a bit slow, but it really took me by surprise.

Added to the clever plotting of the novel, Dunmore’s writing is an absolute delight. Her prose is beautifully simple, but constantly filled with surprising turns of phrase that seem to have more in common with poetry than fiction – which is hardly surprising, seeing as Dunmore is also a highly accomplished poet, who, most recently, won first place in the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition with her poem The Malarkey.

Still, I have to say, no matter how much I loved the book, and it is probably my favourite read of the year so far, the subject matter does get very dark, and I wouldn’t advise anyone to read the book if they were feeling down. For me, though, it was a beautiful, lyrical, and heartbreaking read. I definitely think you will be seeing another Dunmore-related post from me in the very near future.