I had not heard of Susan Fletcher, but when I saw her debut novel ‘Eve Green’ at a church book sale last year, I thought the cover looked appealing, and the blurb on the back sounded interesting.
The story is written from the first person perspective of a young, pregnant woman called Eve who is approaching her thirtieth birthday. The timeline is a tad confusing at first, because it switches - without warning - between the present and the past, when she was around eight years old, and known by her full name of Evangeline, or Evie. I got used to the time switching fairly easily; the author does it well, and the majority of the story takes place in Eve’s childhood.
I thought the writing style was good, quite poetic at times. The descriptions were good without being dull, and although I’m not at all a visual person I could almost imagine some of the places described. I got a feeling for some of the characters too - the unpleasant, angry Mr Phipps was one. Another is Billy, the man considered crazy by the locals, after a horrible accident damaged his mind; but he’s a caring, nature-loving man whom the young Evangeline gets to know and care for.
And yet… I didn’t find myself empathising at all with Eve herself. She tells the story almost prosaically, despite a terrible tragedy that strikes shortly before her eighth birthday. She moves from the city to a a farm in Wales where she lives with her grandparents, and gradually becomes a country-loving child. But there doesn’t seem to be any insight into who she really is. She describes herself in various ways, and we know how different people in the village see her. But she doesn’t feel real, somehow. I couldn’t get inside her head at all.
I also felt that, while the book was very readable, there wasn’t a whole lot of story. There are hints that terrible things happen and that secrets unfold… yet we know, almost from the start, what is going to happen. Eve recounts from her adult perspective when her grandparents died, and how… so when these are described in more detail towards the end, there are no surprises.
There are also hints early in the book that - for instance - a child goes missing, possibly abducted; that Eve herself has a nasty burn mark from a fire; that she had an unpleasant experience with a man at a young age; that the father of her baby is called Daniel. These are expanded on much later in the book, but since they were expected, the expanded telling loses any kind of shock value. I read the last third of the book waiting for some new revelations, some twist, perhaps - and it was all rather predictable as mentioned in the hints.
There are also scraps of information from Eve’s mother’s shoebox of memorabilia: scribbled notes, objects saved for nostalgia. And yet, she never really learns all that much about her unknown father, other than his name. Indeed, none of the real questions are resolved - who started the fire? What happened to the people who disappeared…?
So while I quite enjoyed reading the book, it didn’t feel particularly satisfactory at the end; the final section just sums up what was known already, and leaves us with Eve looking forward to the birth of her baby.
I don’t plan to read this again, and wouldn’t really recommend it - yet it’s won prizes, and is extremely well reviewed, so don’t necessarily take my word for it. If you like poetic, ‘literary’ fiction without a great deal of plot or action, you might like this very much.
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