Three Sagas

(Previously published in 'Mslexia' magazine)

A Writer’s Place 

Catrin Collier: Beggars & Choosers
Mary Larkin: Best Laid Plans
Anna Jacobs: Our Mary Ann

Regional sagas are rarely honoured with anything except a dismissive review, yet all of us are grounded in a sense of place, and this sense is at the core of all successful novels in this field.

The universal, enduring popularity and the commercial success of regional sagas is anathema to some aspiring writers, but is based on the simple premise that if the reader has a feeling for the place, however mythical or illusory, she feels she has a stake in the novel and will enjoy reading it. The key to this appeal is the urban and natural topography of known places. ‘I walked those moors with the wind in my hair …’, ‘That shipyard was at the bottom of my grandfather’s street...’, ‘I go to evensong in that Hawksmoor Church...’

Such novels are essentially rooted in place and time. Classic themes of  growth through endurance, wrongs righted, virtue rewarded and evil vanquished dominate their plots.

The best contemporary work in this field is characterised by fine writing and a willingness to experiment and surprise within the genre. It shows an acute take on social and political context and a post-Freudian, post-feminist insight into the inner life of characters and their development.

In addition, whether it is surrealised, romanticised, or rendered fantastic, a sense of place and time sits alongside the characters as crucial to any proper appreciation of such novelists’ work.

In Beggars & Choosers, Catrin Collier shows us that she knows the streets of Pontyprydd and the Rhonda like no one else. The concrete reality of the streets, shops and houses sits easily on the pages of this meticulously-researched novel, warming the hearts I am sure of the millions of readers in the Welsh diaspora.

Her heroine, Sali Watkin Jones, goes from riches to rags and back to riches in this rather long turn-of-the-century novel. What’s more – in the most charming, beautifully-rendered parts of the novel - Sali turns out to be something of a domestic goddess, keeping house for four very tall, handsome miners, making steamed puddings, fruitcakes and fine meat pies, bottling fruit and vegetables, dipping almonds in chocolate to make sweets. She even gets to put flowers on the table.

Crucially for Collier’s ever-widening popularity, Beggars & Choosers  also has the extra ingredients of Cruelty and Passion - those dark, slippery sisters at the very heart of the most successful Catherine Cookson sagas: the sex in the Collier novel is sometimes revolting, sometimes charming, but always graphic.

Our Mary Ann by Anna Jacobs has the ticking-clock, time-passing structure of many sagas. Jacobs fills in the history for the reader – sometimes in a didactic fashion - as the narrative unfolds. You are left in no doubt that she has done her homework.

In this novel, the heroine and hero are unflaggingly virtuous, the villains  unremittingly devious and cruel, demonstrating less light and shade of character than I prefer.

The moorland, seaside and Blackpool locations are well drawn. But this novel lacks the luscious, sensual detail of  the Collier novel and also the highly personal attachment to its region that characterises Beggars and Choosers. This might just be because the author of Our Mary Ann - although born in Lancashire and a highly successful writer of ‘regional sagas’ - lives in Australia and, according to the cover copy, writes in ‘her spacious waterfront home with dolphins frolicking outside her study window’.

Mary Larkin’s Best Laid Plans is not so much a saga as a simple story of love, requited and unrequited, in 1960s Belfast. We witness a Rolling Stones concert but the style here, in its innocence and moral certainty, is more characteristic of the 1940s. The Troubles loom just a bit, but this simply-told tale is personal, not political. Still, for the devoted regional fans, we do have named streets and cinemas imbued with a reassuring sense of familiarity, however dated. As one fan wrote to her. ‘That’s my granny, that is.’

It could be that Best Laid Plans, and Jacobs’ Our Mary Ann, owe their occasionally jarring sentimentality to the fact that both writers are expatriate. (Mary Larkin, who originates in Belfast, now lives in Darlington.) Of the three, Collier’s more dense and less sentimental style reflects a present and more complex insight into her region and is, ultimately, a more satisfying read.

© Wendy Robertson 2003