Recently published by Hodder & Stoughton, Wendy Erskine’s ‘The Benefactors’ is full of voices that represent the power of small-scale, everyday connection, writes Emma Warren.
Wendy Erskine’s first novel explores the aftermath of an assault, tracking the shock waves as they hit and then continue echoing through people’s lives. It’s not your average book. And this isn’t your average book review, simply because I’m writing it in the wake of a shocking and distressing bereavement. I could have just said ‘sorry Caught by the River, I love you all but I can’t do this’ and everyone would have understood.
But here I am, engaging with this phenomenal book as someone who is also within a vortex unleashed by a rupture in the world as I knew it, and which is pulling everyone involved in different directions. Each of us, already imprinted with our own losses and our own strengths, is responding in ways that are shaped by our individual, familial and cultural lives. The writer in me can even now see the poetry of our responses, if poetry offers truth compressed: that in the worst moments you are yourself, and you respond as only you can. And that planted immediately in the bleakest beginnings are the seeds of repair, or at least a new version of life.
My losses allow me to see in a new way the deep accuracy that Wendy has brought to The Benefactors, which is set in her hometown of Belfast. Three 18-year-old boys assault Misty Johnston at a party. She responds initially with disbelief – I thought they were my friends. Her stepdad Boogie reacts by going to the supermarket and buying her orange juice and a dressing gown. His mum, Nan D, uses the power available to her to bend an arc started by the boys’ mothers Frankie, Miriam and Bronagh, who use the considerable power they have individually and collectively to minimise the impact of their sons’ actions.
Chapters which transmit the story through Misty, Boogie and the mothers are interspersed with a chorus of unnamed characters. Some of these are only a few lines long, others fill a page or two, each coming from someone who lives in the atmosphere and conditions of the world the story takes part in. Conveying dry humour, neighbourhood-level observation, and occasionally, extremely awful realities, they come across as if we’re overhearing the speaker, maybe at the bus stop; or during a testimonial or confession, the kind that takes place in a quiet room or between strangers on a bench; or even tuning into other people’s thoughts through an astral radio dial. These interludes are not interludes, because they’re part of life, reminding me that no incident is an island; a thought which also reminds me of the incident-echoes that everyone carries with them, sometimes volume turned up to blaring, other times just a background hum.
I love these voices in The Benefactors because they help me walk through the world of the book more accurately, and also because they represent the power of small-scale, everyday connection – something that feels acutely important to me right now. The speakers’ humanity is not flattened just because we don’t know their names, or because they weren’t in the centre of the action. They have their moment, and they tell us something. They’re important. We, the readers, have to live with uncertainty and limited information, like in life, and in death, too.
Wendy Erskine is a brilliant, soulful, and extremely careful novelist, and this is an exceptional book.
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‘The Benefactors’ is out now and available here (£18.04). Wendy appears in conversation about the book with Tara Joshi tonight at Special Rider Books in London’s Shepherd’s Bush Market (tickets £4, available here).