Changes

We feel sorry for Michele, who is a bound by her unemotional personality (a ‘cold fish’, in the words of her mother). But Clara is the most tragic character. A complex woman, mother of two middle-aged daughters, she’s always been defined in relation to them. Yet when she works at her pottery, we get a feeling of a potential potentially misused talent, of a yearning to do other things. But Clara finds it impossible to escape domesticity and after a promising sculpture of a mother and daughter, spends years making indifferent vases. The symbolism of the mother/daughter sculpture is potent. It looms over the book. Is it Clara’s best sculpture because its subject was so important to her? Michele is aware of the honour of receiving the statuette as a gift, but her husband scoffs at it.

Jim is described as ‘accommodating’ yet it is his intransigence, brought on by an untimely middle-aged crisis, which endangers the couple’s relationship. His character is subtly drawn, even though his reactions are no different to from those of similar men, in similar novels and films. In such a situation, the range of gestures available to people is limited, especially in the setting of an upper -middle -class Hampstead household. But the force that drives him, the final, mulish single-mindedness, we recognise as one of the tragic masculine waves capable of destroying everything before them. The area of the potential disaster is small – a comfortable family in North London – yet Ziervogel’s talent means the reader cares about the outcome of the drama. She uses flashbacks of the couple’s warm embraces to precisely convey how harmonious their marriage used to be. She circles the defining incident between them with these flashbacks and with leaps forward in time. This structure works well; it feels like the autopsy of a network of family relationships, with the writer as a highly -skilled pathologist and the readers as mesmerized medical students.

For more by this author, try her first novel, [[Magda by Meike Ziervogel|Magda]]. And for another tale of an uneasy mother and daughter relationship, do have a look at [[A Woman's Story by Annie Ernaux]]. You might also like [[Breathing in Colour by Clare Jay]].