The action of Anna Stothard’s fourth novel takes place on a single day in a single location, yet within those few hours the lives of Cathy and her current and former lovers unfold in flashbacks to create a vaster landscape. This tightly plotted yet expansive structure, in which tiny events release powerful memories, mirrors Cathy’s attempts to deal with her past.
Cathy’s childhood was spent on the edge of Essex, in a chalet meant for holiday stays which, as a home, was damp and unlovely. The tides swept in and out, bearing objects. Cathy and her friend Jack were collectors, curators and sculptors of these and other treasures, scouring the shoreline for bird skulls or fusing plastic soldiers together with match flames. With her parents offering little in the way of structure, Cathy constructed her own protective carapace out of the things she scavenged with Jack. Her early life contained both wonderful and terrible events and now she is caught up in the struggle to split off the bad memories from the good. It’s exhausting work.
Now grown (but perhaps not quite grown up), Cathy’s childhood self persists within her adult form. She’s as scared as she ever was of being overwhelmed by a tidal wave, either literal or metaphorical, the one as deadly as the other. After a terrible loss and a punishingly unhealthy relationship, her collection of objects has become her defence mechanism, a way to trap dangerous memories and keep them safely locked up. The strategy has worked up to a point: Cathy has got away, first to Los Angeles and then to Berlin, where she lives with Tom and works at the Natural History Museum there. The museum provides a mesmerising setting for the novel’s present, its labyrinthine rooms full of startling creatures that demand to be catalogued in poetic lists. This almost obsessive listing mirrors the comfort Cathy derives from keeping her lifetime’s acquisitions safe. Just running through her favourite things, holding them in her hand, is a lullaby that holds fear at bay.
It’s at the museum that Cathy’s drama reaches its climax. With the tension ramped up by a red-carpet event and a melee of protesters on the steps outside, Cathy’s animal kingdom is invaded by Daniel, a man who has dogged her life for years, even from a prison cell. Stothard is expert at intense feelings that teeter on a knife edge between terror and erotic charge. Her protagonist’s ambivalent emotions about Daniel are the embodiment of cognitive dissonance, and the reader fully shares the psychological discomfort it causes.
Stothard steers her narrative forward steadily and with great control, perhaps another aspect of this being a bulwark against all the frightening things in the world. This is a novel to be savoured, not least for its teeming parade of beasts: the text itself is a wunderkammer that makes us swoon with its surfeit of content. But, beyond that, it contains a wealth of emotional truth which is held out like a rope to rescue the drowning. The complex unfolding of the plot, like reverse origami, is beautifully done. We attempt to assert control over our lives by imposing order but, as Stothard shows, ultimately things need to be overturned so that we can breathe and grow.
• Jane Housham’s The Apprentice of Split Crow Lane is published by Riverrun. The Museum of Cathy is published by Salt. To order a copy for £7.37 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
