Dave's Book Blog: "Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine" by Gail Honeyman

Winner of the 2017 Costa debut novel award.

This story is narrated by Eleanor Oliphant, an office worker in her early 30s. She lives alone, so alone that she drinks vodka to block out the weekend. Why? Because Eleanor hasn’t a clue how to fit in with normal social life. "I wasn't good at pretending, that was the thing." (Ch 23) Why is this? Because something terrible has happened to her in her childhood.

The plot of the book is driven by three things:

Firstly, Eleanor develops a crush on a rock star. This is the least convincing part of the book. She herself belatedly realises how stupid it is for a thirty year old woman to behave like a moon-struck schoolgirl but even so I found it almost impossible to suspend my disbelief.
Secondly, a chance encounter with Raymond from IT develops into an unlikely friendship. And it is unlikely. Raymond is almost saintly in his efforts to persevere with a woman who is ungracious to say the least and sometimes downright hostile.
Thirdly, and most importantly, is Eleanor's relationship with Mummy, with whom she holds a conversation every Wednesday night. Drip by drip, the author feeds us information about the trauma at the bottom of Eleanor's damaged psyche as if Eleanor herself is remembering it morsel by morsel. But this too doesn't quite work. In Chapter Eight, less than a quarter of the way through the book, Eleanor muses about one of her favourite books: "Jane Eyre. A strange child, difficult to love. A lonely, only child. She's left to deal with so much pain at such a young age - the aftermath of death, the absence of love. It's Mr Rochester who gets burned in the end. I know how that feels. All of it." It's clear that Eleanor knows more than she is telling the reader. It felt to me that the way the 'secret' was revealed was more a contrivance of the author's than the narrator gradually piecing together her past. And some of the 'clues' are couched in a way so as to mislead the reader; this also sometimes seemed fake. For example, one of the items of information in the passage above is untrue (or at best half true). I considered whether this meant that Eleanor was an unreliable narrator but given the way she seems dedicated to telling unpleasant truths, this seemed unlikely. I concluded that I was being deceived by the author for the purposes of suspense; once again it was disbelief that wasn't suspended.

Pacing is another aspect of the plot and sometimes this was slow. There were too many minutely observed parties and gigs and funerals and tea. I found the narrative dragged from time to time.

If the plot doesn't work, does the character? The Wednesday conversations make it clear that Eleanor's mother is psychologically abusive and controlling. Eleanor's face is scarred as the result of a fire. Eleanor was brought up in foster homes. She is appallingly lonely, using vodka to cope with weekends in which she rarely talks to another person. "When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life." (Ch 6) And yet she repels anyone who attempts to make social contact with her. She doesn't like being touched physically or emotionally. Mostly, judging from the repeated snide asides, such as "Sports day was the one day of the year when the less academically gifted students could triumph ... As if a silver in the egg-and-spoon race was some sort of compensation for not understanding how to use an apostrophe." (Ch 10), she feels herself to be better than ordinary people. This is partly because she is clever and partly, we presume, because of how she was brought up by Mummy.

Eleanor is therefore a hugely complex character ... but somehow she didn't strike true to me. The pieces didn't fit. Again, I didn't believe.

I'm not the only one. All of the other members of the group with whom I read this book in 2017 hated it. They found the characters and situation extraordinarily unconvincing. Detail after detail was condemned. The social worker wouldn't have done that, Eleanor would have refused to go to the hospital with Raymond, Raymond wouldn't have been so persistent, Eleanor would have known about Magners, Eleanor would have been unable to set up the modem to connect herself to the internet. Eleanor is a classics scholar and a pedant so she should know better than to use the phrase “the hoi polloi” (Ch 12) given that 'hoi polloi' is Greek for ‘the people’ so Eleanor is saying 'the the people'. These were but a few of their objections. Others I have left out for fear of presenting spoilers.

On the other hand, another friend loved the book, reading it in under 48 hours and loved it. She wasn't worried about documentary accuracy; she saw the whole story as events picking away at the cocoon Eleanor had built around herself so that she was forced to find a more sociable way to negotiate the world.

So it's a 'Marmite' book. And it undeniably entertains. This is because Eleanor acts like a 'man from Mars': she makes literalist and acerbic comments about everyday events and ordinary people, such as:

“That palpable sense of Friday joy, everyone colluding with the lie that somehow the weekend would be amazing” (Ch 2)
“Terrible people danced in a terrible way to terrible music” (Ch 5)
“I have often noticed that people who routinely wear sports wear are the least likely sort to participate in athletic activity.” (Ch 10)
“Imagine having to micturate in a row along side other men, strangers, acquaintances, friends, even? It must be dreadful. Just think how odd it would be if we had to display our genitals to one another” (Ch 21)

I enjoyed these remarks. They combined humour and truth. Eleanor could have been successful as a stand-up comedian with material like this. But the humour is two-way. We are laughing with Eleanor about other people (an given her innate sense of superiority we are mocking everyday folk which isn't very nice) and we are laughing at Eleanor for her gaucheness, born of her damaged psyche, which is also not very nice. So it was entertaining but rather cruel.

Nevertheless, it has become a worldwide best-seller, so what do I know?

Selected quotes:

“If I'm ever unsure as to the correct course of action, I’ll think, ‘What would a ferret do?’” (Ch 2)
“His eyes were light brown. They were light brown in the way that a rose is red, or that the sky is blue. They defined what it meant to be light brown.” (Ch 2)
“I feel sorry for beautiful people. Beauty, from the moment you possess it, is already slipping away, ephemeral.” (Ch 3)
“The goal ultimately was successful camouflage as a human woman.” (Ch 3)
“My face a scarred palimpsest of fire.” (Ch 3)
“It’s always nice to hear my first name spoken aloud by a human voice.” (Ch 6)
"Polly ... a parrot plant ... was a birthday present, but I can't remember who gave her to me, which is strange. I was not, after all, a girl who was overwhelmed with gifts." (Ch 6)
"Mummy said that we were empresses, sultanas and maharanis in our own home, and that it was our duty to live a life of sybaritic pleasure and indulgence. Every meal should be an epicurean feast for the senses, she said, and one should go hungry rather than sully one's palate with anything less than exquisite morsels." (Ch 7)
"I have yet to find a genre of music I enjoy; it's basically audible physics, waves and energized particles, and, like most sane people, I have no interest in physics." (Ch 8)
“What was a muse anyway? I was familiar with the classical allusion, of course, but in modern-day practical terms, a muse seemed simply to be an attractive woman whom the artist wanted to sleep with.” (Ch 8)
“She looked at him with so much love that I had to turn away. At least I know what love looks like, I told myself. That's something. No one has ever looked at me like that, but I'd be able to recognise it if they ever did.” (Ch 10)
"Men like Raymond, pedestrian dullards, would always be distracted by women who looked like her, having neither the wit nor the sophistication to see beyond mammaries and peroxide." (Ch 11)
"I suppose one of the reasons we're all able to continue to exist for our allotted span in this green and blue vale of tears is that there is always, however remote it might seem, the possibility of change." (Ch 22)
“Go and sit in your empty little flat and watch television on your own, just like you do Every. Single. Night ... I sat down and watched television alone like I do Every. Single. Night .” (Ch 22)
“It takes a long time to learn to live with loss, assuming you ever manage it. After all these years, I'm still something of a work in progress.” (Ch 23)
"Grief is the price we pay for love, so they say. The price is far too high." (Ch 23)
“I was ready to rise from the ashes and be reborn.” (Ch 25)
"This was my soul curling into whiteness, an existential blank where a person had once been." (Ch 26)
"What, I wondered, was the point of me. I contributed nothing to the world, absolutely nothing, and I took nothing from it either." (Ch 26)
“Was I alive? I hoped so, but only because if this was the location of the afterlife, I'd be lodging an appeal immediately.” (Ch 27)
“The lift had transported me back in time to that least belle of epoques - the 1980s.” (Ch 28)
"Obscenity is the distinguishing hallmark of a sadly limited vocabulary." (Ch 32)
“Such a strange unusual feeling - light, calm, as though I'd swallowed sunshine.” (Ch 32)