Chambers writes with honesty about human experience and the redemptive power of love
One spring afternoon, the hospital is notified about a disturbance at a partially derelict house five miles away. A mute 37-year-old man called William Tapping, his beard grown down to his waist, has been discovered at his aunt Louisa’s home.
Louisa is ill and admitted to hospital, William to Westbury Park. When Helen visits Louisa to discuss William, the conversation haunts her: “The answers were so matter-of-fact, so cheerfully delivered, so very nearly rational, and yet somewhere beneath them lay the wreckage of a man’s life.” Helen realises William is a talented artist, and begins to explore his background in the hopes of finding workable sources of support for him. Shy Creatures initially appears to be the story of Helen and charming narcissist Gil, and “the tired old treads of their relationship”, but as the Tapping family story begins to weave around Helen’s own, her professional and personal lines become blurred. Moving fluently between 1964 and decades earlier, the novel reveals the secrets of William’s uneasy early life with three spinster aunts. He is a sweet-natured, naive and literal-minded child, who makes a friend at boarding school when they are the only two boys horrified at the sight of a classmate battering a terrified baby mouse until it is “smashed to a pink paste”. While Helen is learning about the Tappings, she is simultaneously forced to confront the reality of a future as Gil’s secret lover: “all of her minuscule acts of kindness, charity, unselfishness were like grains of sand dropped into the scale to try and balance the great boulder of Wrong that she perpetrated every day against Kath and The Children”. Aside from overly confident Gil, Chambers’s characters are either timid, trapped by a troubled childhood, or uncertain, watching and waiting in the margins. One of the novel’s many pleasures is how convincingly unswinging 1964 is: rationing remains a recent memory, Helen prefers the Third Programme to pop, and Lorraine’s parents are horror-struck by their daughter’s desire for a life different from theirs. Since Uncertain Terms, Chambers’s books have been characterised by extraordinary insights into so-called ordinary lives. That she is often described as the author of historical romance novels strikes me as both reductive and unnecessary: she writes with honesty and compassion about human experience, and the redemptive power of love and kindness. William is particularly memorable, and it’s impossible to read Shy Creatures without fervently wishing a happy childhood for him, even if he has to wait until adulthood for it.Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers: Extraordinary insights into so-called ordinary livesIf you want to know whether Sinn Féin’s housing policy will work, look at what it achieved in the NorthKitchen porter left jobless after fatal shooting at Blanchardstown steakhouse awarded €22,000 Man allegedly beaten at Dublin city squat says he ‘didn’t want to die’ in country he sought refuge inMore than half of patients assessed under HSE programme at risk of diabetes or cardiovascular disease
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