Thursday, October 31, 2024

 





An Intimate Portrait of Grotesque Innocence

 
Sophie White – Where I End


Reviewed by Barry Lee Dejasu


Sophie White’s latest novel, Where I End, is probably going to be the most uncomfortable read you’ll pick up this year. Originally published in 2022 by Tramp Press, this year the novel finds a new home in Erewhon Books, an imprint of Kensington Books, which will help spread the attention, accolades, and hype that this Shirley Jackson Award-winning novel deserves.


Where I End is the narrative of a young woman living on an Irish coastal island, and the morosely isolated day to day life that she spends caring for her bedridden mother…whose unknown condition has left her a paralyzed, gaunt, haggard shell that does little more than utter creaking groans, eyes flicking back and forth. The narrator, who is eventually identified as Aoileann (“EEL-un”), along with her Móraí (Gaelic for “grandmother”) toil away at bathing, feeding, changing, and constantly repositioning the mother on her bed using home-made pulley systems and leather straps. It is the mother’s terribly vegitative state—coupled with the constant, angst-ridden care routines for her—that leaves her referred to throughout the book as “the bed-thing.” Elsewhere, the inbred inhabitants of the island are cruelly indifferent—and often just plain cruel—to Aoileann, and her father is away most of the time, leaving his mother and daughter to take care of what’s left of his unwell wife. So it is that Aoileann’s world becomes very quickly flipped over when she meets an artist from the mainland named Rachel and her six-month-old baby, who’s come to the island to help set up a museum being opened…and nothing will ever be the same for Aoileann.


You’d wish Aoileann was an unreliable narrator, because the story that she carries the reader through is so grim and uncomfortable that you’ll find yourself groaning and shifting around in your seat. There’s hardly anything in the way of violence or gore, which is why it doesn’t quite fit the bill of “body horror,” as some reviews and blurbs describe it. Aoileann’s narrative is less horrifying than it is unflinching, presented in such a matter of fact and intimate delivery that brings the grotesquerie even more tangibly, uncomfortably into your senses.


Mystery and disquiet can be found throughout this tale, such as how mother somehow frees herself from her bed at night, only to be discovered in her paralyzed state in different rooms or even outside, and the mysterious symbols scratched into the wooden floors, seemingly by her. But there’s also an overpowering sense of wonder, and of beauty, to the narrative, as Aoileann’s childlike naïveté and candor captures moments of gruesomeness and bliss within the same scope. Sophie White is an artist of the written word, and readers are putty in her hands.


In some ways, Where I End reads like a spin on Shirley Jackson’s seminal 1962 novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, if written with the hallucinatory stylings of Joyce Carol Oates and Patrick McGrath. Worth noting, too, is how the book shares some similarities to Naben Ruthnum’s depressing and disturbing novella Helpmeet, which was released the same year, and which makes a darksome companion piece.


By turns tragic, grim, mysterious, and beautiful, Where I End is a tale that you’ll never forget—even though at times the things that Aoileann does and thinks will make you wish you could.