Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine (by Gail Honeyman)

(Amazon UK link)

I’m not usually a fan of literary fiction, or unexpected best-sellers. So although I saw Gail Honeyman’s debut novel ‘Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine’ advertised several times a couple of years ago, I didn’t think it would appeal. However I then read several positive reviews from people whose opinions I respect, and I also spotted it on very special offer from Amazon in the spring. So I decided to try it.

The book sat on my to-be-read shelf for many months but I finally picked it up a few days ago. I was immediately drawn into the story. It’s told in the first person by a thirty-year-old woman, who - at first glance - appears to be on the autistic spectrum. Her life follows a clear pattern: she goes to work, buys a ready-meal in her lunch break, clocks off at the same time each day and goes back to her flat. She cooks similar evening meals every day, solves cryptic crosswords, and goes to bed. At the weekend she drinks a lot of vodka, and sees nobody.

It soon becomes clear that, far from being autistic, Eleanor is an extremely lonely person who was both neglected and abused as a child. She has clamped down rigidly on her emotions and expectations in order to survive, and it has become an engrained habit. She is considered weird at her workplace, but doesn’t seem to mind. She has no ambition, and excessively low self-esteem. The worst point of her week is the regular Wednesday evening chat with her mother, who appears to be in some kind of institution.

Then Eleanor falls in a big way for a singer she sees on stage, and decides that she needs to re-make herself to be more attractive. We learn so much about her as she visits various places, starting with an extremely painful - and expensive - bikini wax. She is naive in the extreme, but some of her observations are tinged with humour. She comments, quite reasonably, that other people’s expectations and the demands of fashion are far more bizarre than her own ideas and habits.

I don’t know quite what it is about this character-driven book that appealed to me so strongly. Eleanor’s background is horrendous. Hints early in the book mean that when it’s all finally uncovered, there are few surprises. Indeed, there’s only one revelation towards the end of the book which I was not expecting. It’s very cleverly written, the reader seeing so much more than the narrator.

Despite the theme, it’s an uplifting book. Through various circumstances Eleanor slowly becomes aware of positive feelings: caring about others, gift-giving, affection, wanting the best. She meets some delightful people. While it’s deeply sad that she expects the worst - assuming they will dislike or reject her - her growing awareness of the reality of friendship, of genuinely ‘nice’ people, is very moving.

Criticism has been made that the author is trying to deal with serious psychiatric illness in rather a trite way; but that seems to me to miss the point. Eleanor is not congenitally psychiatrically ill. She is seriously screwed up due to a terrible childhood, and convinced that she is an unlovable person. So it seems entirely reasonable to me that overtures of friendship and the uncovering of some of her repressed memories will help her to move forward.

It may be a painful book for anyone who has suffered as Eleanor Oliphant did. No details are given, but the overview is bad enough. Overall, though, I thought it was a positive, encouraging book. The author wisely does not give us a trite or happy-ever-after ending, but one that has hope for the future, enabling the reader to make their own decision.

There's some bad language and plenty of references (albeit without detail) to both sexual and physical abuse; but nothing gratuitous. It's decidedly not for children or younger teens. But for adults or older teenagers, looking for a character-based book that’s different from most and has a lot of depth, I would recommend this very highly.

Review copyright 2019 Sue's Book Reviews