Linda Grant’s ambitious first novel attempts to portray the political and
social ambiguities and uncertainties of the 20th century through the life of
one woman. Sybil Ross is half-Jewish, half-German, brought up in the
Liverpool of the Thirties and Forties by her middle-European furrier father
and glamorous mother. Dislocated by this dual inheritance, Sybil’s life
takes place on the margins of history. Never quite belonging, she follows
Stan, her merchant sailor, bisexual lover to New York, where both of them
are as foreign as the city. She works as a vendeuse in a smart department
store, drawing on the expertise instilled in her by her label obsessed
mother – you are what you wear – while he peddles baking skills, dope and sex.
In Harlem she dances to Duke Ellington, and into the arms of Julius, black
activist and autodidact, and the Communist Party of America.
Sybil’s father, burdened by the weight of his Jewish history tells her she
is born an animal, and that her life’s work is to become human. This sense
of emptiness leads her to choose the hard path of Julius, to imbue herself
with meaning. But Sybil’s life has no narrative push. Passive, it is only
her spur of the moment sexual desire for Julius that leads her away from
Stan and towards ideas of justice. Bitterly she submits to the dictats of
the party and her abandonment by Julius as he leaves to go to Moscow, to
continue his revolutionary education. Her voyage of discovery finds her
washed from the East Coast, through factories and small towns of the deep
mid-West, to pitch up finally on the Northern West coast in Alaska, two
decades later. It is here that both her lovers turn up, Julius a humiliated
wreck after his experience in Moscow, Stan still peddling sex and baking.
Yet even at this point there are still a couple of decades to go. And the
great emotional pay-off we are waiting for never happens. Any novel with a
brief to catalogue history through the life of one person courts all sorts
of narrative dangers, didacticism , sublimation of character to historical
narrative, imperatives that can lead to an emptiness at the heart of a book,
negating even the most worthy of ideas or beautifully crafted prose. On
the whole The Cast Iron Shore avoids these pitfalls. Sybil’s constant
awareness of her marginality evokes instead the outsider that we all
secretly experience ourselves to be. By evading the trap of assigning a
narrative cohesion to our pasts, we are cut off from the comfort of a
notional destiny. So the expected emotional payoff loses its importance as
the central truth of the novel is finally revealed. Or rather not revealed:
it was always there staring us in the face. We cannot write our histories
in advance or in retrospect, but must, in that most post-modern of senses,
submit to the vacillations of character and circumstance and surrender that
dearest and most dishonest of illusions – the happy ending.
Reviewed by Sara Rance
