A Song for Issy Bradley

This novel opens with the death of the youngest member of a British Mormon family, the titular Issy Bradley. The balance of the novel is concerned with the reactions of the various members of the family to that event. It may not be an overly original concept, but in a novel that is concerned with faith and its many manifestations, it is an excellent vehicle for applying the necessary stressors.

It’s hard to call any one character “central”, but I suppose the most prominent is the mother/wife, Claire. She’s a “convert” – I use quotation marks because her conversion is written as largely a function of having met the man who became her husband at a moment of severe emotional vulnerability. He comes from a very conservative, overly-religious family, the kind where the mother purses her lips at news of a bishop’s adultery and opines that that’s what happens when you let women into the workforce. The novelist was raised in the Mormon church and left in her 30s, and Claire is evidently an analogue for her in the novel: finding herself somehow inserted into an institution she doesn’t feel she really chose for herself.

Virginia Woolf wrote that when an argument is made dispassionately, it’s the argument you think about, whereas when it’s made emotionally, you think about the person speaking. This book is not a dispassionate criticism of the Mormon church. Although nobody leaves the faith, and indeed one of the characters has his/her shaky faith restored, it’s clear that the author views the whole institution as completely bonkers. Nowhere is this more evident than in one scene, in which the teenage girls of the church are forced to dress up in their mothers’ wedding dresses in order to pre-enact their own marriages. And old Ginny was right: it was impossible not to think about the novelist’s personal anger whenever something particularly hypocritical happened.

Oddly enough, the novelist’s anger seemed strangely absent right in the place where I most experienced my own. (Spoilers follow.) The husband, Ian, commits what I consider to be rape against his wife. (Definitions may vary, but reasonable people could definitely get together and agree that, at the very least, it’s borderline illegal and morally indefensible.) Although this is not viewed with approval by the novelist, the ultimate ending of the novel does indicate that she might consider it to be forgivable, or even excusable. That result is not acceptable to me. It’s a shame, because up to the last couple of paragraphs, I had been more or less enjoying the ride. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a perfectly adequate read otherwise.