This conceit works well: Moira’s vanity becomes all the more marked given the helpless state her sister is in. Moira feels responsible for the coma her sister Amy is lying in, but feels that Amy is responsible for the disturbed state of her soul and so she has forced herself into this private reckoning, telling stories of her selfishness and betrayal to a woman who cannot hear her. However, while Moira is less pleasant company than Eve, her self-absorption is more intriguing than the latter’s often dreamy wistfulness.įletcher’s second novel is far more emotionally bleak in tone and spirit than her first: indeed, it is an extended study of resentment. At boarding school, lonely and bullied by the other children, she becomes increasingly bitter about the baby at home, but even then there is the sense that Moira is forcing her own unhappiness. When her sister is born she believes she has been relegated in the eyes of her parents, that she is no longer capable of commanding attention and affection. When she wins a scholarship it becomes something about which she can sulk. Moira is far more fortunate and yet refuses to accept this. She loses her mother, does not know if her father is alive or dead, and has to relocate from Birmingham to her grandparents’ farm in North Wales when she is only seven years old. It is far easier to feel sympathy for Eve. Eve’s tale is one of an innocent and naive girl forced to confront the brutal realities of life, while Moira is seeking to come to terms with her own cruelty and coldness, dark aspects of personality which she has cultivated as much as checked. The eponymous heroine of Fletcher’s debut, soon to give birth to her first child, laments her reckless actions after the disappearance of a girl in her village, while Moira Stone in Oystercatchers, sitting at the bedside of her comatose sister, hopes to atone for having spent her life wishing her younger sibling harm.Īlthough Eve Green and Moira Stone share a similar need to confess, they are distinct in character. These novels, confessional in form, are necessary expiations, excavations of years of accumulated remorse. Both Eve Green (2004) and Oystercatchers (2007) are based around the reminiscence of narrators who wish to share the shame they feel for the wrong they have done in their lives. Her characters are at the mercy of the wanton malice of chance, yet they are also imprisoned within their own failings, seeking release.
Susan Fletcher’s themes are manifold: she deals with loss, loneliness, guilt and the physic damage caused by the burden of keeping secrets.
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