Edith & Oliver
This is the story of a romance and marriage between the Irish man and woman in the title of this highly readable, intelligent novel. In the first decade of the 20th century, Oliver is an illusionist performing in variety and music halls and Edith is an accompanying pianist. They meet in their home town of Belfast in 1906, fall in love, and marry, and Edith has twins. All this happens in the first few pages of the plot, and the subsequent narrative unfolds their relationship and the growth of their children Agna and Archie, and also reveals Oliver’s difficult childhood with his broken family, which gave him the motivation to make his career as an illusionist.
The tale demonstrates the contingency and uncertainty of the harsh entertainment industry when providing for a young family before the days of state social support, and Oliver has to spend long frustrating times on the road to make any sort of living. As he gets older, his appeal to the changing variety hall declines, and he becomes vexed and exasperated by his inability to become the success he is convinced he deserves to be. The family become impoverished with the associating strains this invariably causes, and matters do not end terribly well, which is giving little away, as the very first chapter flags up that the relationship ends in tears.
We hear little of Edith’s background, making the novel a little unbalanced—as if the writer found Oliver’s story to be much more absorbing and thus rather neglected Edith’s—though Oliver’s background shows how difficult it can be to evade the effects of a traumatic childhood as an adult. This is a poetic, thoughtful novel.
