Dave's Book Blog: "The Other Half of Augusta Hope" by Joanna Glen

"A therapeutic dose of high-strength emotion" (The Guardian)

Augusta and Julia are twins though born on either side of midnight on 31st July, hence their names. They live in grey suburbia with a domestic mum and a dad who is so scared of the world that he never lets them do anything. Julia is the pretty twin, Augusta the clever one who loves words and facts and can't be dissuaded from telling you all the fascinating things she has learned. They grow up. Julia heads for a life as wife and mother with the boy next door while Augusta goes to University and dreams of escaping to Spain.

Parfait is the eldest son of a large family of farmers in Burundi. Inter-ethnic civil war kills his parents and his brother Wilfred's twin; his twin sisters are raped and abducted. He decides to travel to Spain with his little brother Zion in the hopes of a new life.

In the final quarter of the book these two stories, which have been told in alternating chapters (some as short as a single page) come together.

It was a wonderful book. Augusta is smart and funny and wise without realising it; Parfait is good and kind and thoughtful despite the horrible circumstances of his childhood. Of the supporting characters, Augusta's father, a frightened little man who curtails the horizons of himself and his family because he is so scared of what might lie beyond, is superbly drawn. On the fateful holiday to Spain they go every day to his favourite part of the beach, a secluded spot away from the nudists: "This spot was special for him because he could hide his burnt knees and his inadequacies, and he didn’t have to ask for ice creams at the kiosk, pointing furiously, panicking, handing over the wrong money." (p 84) I know that man; I've been that man.

The prose is beautifully constructed in short, sharp sentences, often in single-sentence paragraphs in which the subsequent paragraph either completes or contradicts the previous one. For example:

"My parents didn’t seem the sort of people who would end up killing someone. Everyone would say that - except the boy who died, who isn't saying anything." (p 1)
"He always had new dreams up his sleeve. But the truth was that none of them ever seemed to slip out of his sleeve into real life." (p 3)
"A sign went up saying, ‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ except you had to take your eyes off the road to look at the sign. Sometimes, I thought, adults just don’t think things through." ( p 12)
"‘Professors at Cambridge University still need to cook,’ said my mother. Which was a perfect example of the knack she had of entirely missing the point." (p 63)

This section of the analysis contains spoilers. The construction is also perfect:

The rapid swapping of viewpoint allows the two stories to be told together; for most of the book they are joined thematically as, for example, when Augusta's mum talks about roses and Parfait's brother starts a rose farm. This device enables cross-fertilising foreshadowing and the contrast between the boring suburban life of Augusta and the on-the-edge existence of Parfait is rendered deeper without the need for comment.
It starts with a great hook: "My parents didn’t seem the sort of people who would end up killing someone. Everyone would say that - except the boy who died, who isn't saying anything." I carried this through almost to the end of the book.
At the 25% mark Julia and her parents go the the beach in Andalusia without Augusta and something happens; Julia acquires a secret which drives a wedge between the sisters and isn't revealed until the 75% mark. Shortly afterwards triumph meets tragedy when Parfait travels across the sea from Tangier to Spain in a little rubber dinghy and his brother Zion is drowned. The horror of this sea passage is encapsulate in a single sentence in which punctuation is brilliantly set aside for stream of consciousness: "I tried to sound strong and calm, but my breathing was laboured now, and the boat wasn’t handling right, it was being knocked about, side to side, up and down, and I was throwing up again, and the waves were getting bigger and coming into the boat, and our feet were soaking wet to our ankles, lurching lurching in the dark, water bursting over the sides as we rocked and rolled, side to side, back, forward, back forward – and I was more frightened by far, by far, than I had ever been in the whole of my frightening life."
At the 50% mark Augusta goes to University and finally loses her virginity; her father's shop goes bankrupt and shortly afterwards he has a stroke. Parfait begins the healing process when he starts to paint and sells his paintings to a local art gallery; Wilfred his brother, bereaved twin and elective mute, starts to speak.
Two thirds of the way through Julia loses her baby. She tells Augusta her secret: "There was a boy. And I didn’t save him. I didn’t save him." (p 265). She then takes an empty pram and dies, struck by a train on a level crossing. The grieving and the funeral follows: "My mother made more tea. The tea tasted of copper." (p 272)
At the 75% mark Augusta's family begins its healing by buying and beginning to restore the gypsy caravan she's always dreamed of. But she and Julia's husband Diego travel to Spain where she meets an artist on the beach (Parfait): "There was an artist with his easel beside the beach road, his skin smooth and conker-coloured, his bunch of plaits tied up so that his cheekbones stuck out" (p 227)
The last quarter of the book is a roller coaster of emotions. I so wanted Augusta and Parfait to have a relationship and so many things seemed to be about to stop them. Parfait wanted to return to Burundi to support his brother Wilfred. Augusta becomes pregnant by Diego. Most of all, of course, there is the discovery that Augusta's parents watched Diego's brother drown.

Selected quotes:

"Death would come along, and everything we’d found out would be buried with us. Which seemed a terrible waste. Shouldn’t we first be tipped upside down to let all our knowledge out – like when you empty a piggy bank of its coins?" (p 7)
"Think what a huge word rumour is, positively bulging with stuff, like a massive delusional warehouse." (p 9)
"My grandmother would sit in the corner of the lounge on Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons, commenting on our lives like a one-woman Greek chorus" ( p 11)
"‘Unnecessary.’ Which I suppose is what beauty is." ( p 20)
"I feel my mother’s arms around me, the slight damp of her armpits on my shoulders, the warmth of my cheek against her soft chest and the deep shiver of belonging running down my spine to the soles of my feet." (p 20)
"I thought of how much I wanted to find it, that thing I couldn’t find, whatever it was." (p 63)
"She’d died in the spring. As she lay bald and fading to nothing in the English hospice, the apple blossom fell past her window and rotted in the grass." (p 68)
"‘Or would it be hell?’ said Mr Sánchez. ‘If you found the past, all piled up by the side of the road. All the things you’d ever said. All the things you’d ever thought. All the things you’d ever done.’" (p 69)
"And I thought how strange language was – one letter turned duck into fuck. Just like that." (p 91)
"I could feel little specks of anxiety inside me, moving, like bacteria under a microscope." (p 114)
"The earliest sundials are shadow clocks from Egypt, dated at 1500 BC. I guess human beings have always wanted to tell the time. To know how long is left." (p 141)
"he opened his mouth, and he started to sing, and his voice split up into strands, fraying, as if there was blood on his vocal cords, or in his heart." (p 168)
"But don’t we all have experiences all the time that are only ours. None of us can ever imagine being someone else. Isn’t that why being human is lonely?" (p 175)
"Sometimes I feel bad for all those little half-babies slopping about at the bottom of the condom. Little dead tadpoles, which served no purpose at all. They lost a race. And that was it." (p 176)
"I painted twilight trembling in the bulrushes at the river’s edge" (p 188)
"‘Do you think that’s what we all are?’ I said. ‘Pinned butterflies who think we can fly?’" (p 189)
"Olly’s parents couldn’t, or didn’t, come. He was their fifth child, and I think they were running out of steam." (p 221)
"I counted the egrets, and got to six hundred, tiny white flames flecking the branches, like an old-fashioned Christmas tree in a European children’s book." (p 226)
"Our relationship was dead, and the stone would not be rolled away." (p 239)
"I was out in thatched communities where the graves were fuller than the houses." (p 242)
"If they put their gloves on, they wouldn’t be frightened of the kinds of things that could happen in life, their lives too. Like when someone tells you they have cancer, and you want to feel more scared for them than you do for yourself." (p 273)
"I thought, and the fear of it sent me running up the stairs, to our bedroom, where I got into Julia’s cold bed, deep deep down, all of me, under the duvet, which was too tight because my mother always tucked the bedspread in under the mattress. "(p 274)
"I never knew grief felt so much like fear." (p 277)
"No matter how many times he’d said Nothing to worry about, there were, in the end, things to worry about, and he couldn’t stop them." (p 313)