Lily by Rose Tremain
I am a big fan of Rose Tremain’s novels. ‘Restoration’, her 1989 novel about the adventures of the unheroic but fascinating Sir Robert Merivel during the reign of Charles II, is one of the best, most entertaining novels I have read in the last few years. It gives me no pleasure to say, however, that I found her current novel distinctly average.
'Lily' is an historical novel set in slap bang in the Victorian period and concerns the young life of Lily Mortimer, the name conferred on her by the Coram Foundling Hospital where she was taken after having been abandoned as a baby in London’s Victoria Park on a cold winter’s night. Her saviour on that night was a young police constable, Sam Trench, who almost lost his life as he carried the abandoned bundle by foot to safety through the snowy and icy cold streets. As a child, she is sent to foster parents in Suffolk who are paid to look after her for the first six years of her life, a common arrangement for foundlings, until she is returned to Coram where she is raised, partially educated and put to work until she reached adulthood.
The simple but loving and happy time she spent at Rookery Farm, with her foster family the Bucks, is contrasted with the cruel physical and emotional abuse she suffers at Coram where she is daily reminded that, like all the other foundlings, she is the product of sin and will forever be tainted by that shame.
The novel moves between her past life, with piteous descriptions of the daily cruelties at the foundling hospital, and her present life where we discover she has become a skilled wig maker for Belle Prettiwood’s business that supplies stage wigs for the opera. Lily finds some form of purpose in her work and comradeship with her employer and colleagues. It is, however, clear that she has been damaged by her upbringing and, in particular, the brutal removal from her loving foster parents to an unloving, unkind environment.
The shuffling of the narrative’s chronology also makes us aware that Lily has committed an act of violent revenge against her cruel past and so she lives with a daily sense that an inexorable justice will track her down and punish her for this crime. This is only heightened when Trench, now a senior policeman, reappears in her life – she senses a spark between them but things are complicated not least by her dread that she will weaken and confess her crime to him.
There is a denouement and resolution to this rather melodramatic story and part of my disappointment is that, for such a skilful writer, it seems rather rushed and pat. In fact, that is in essence my problem with the whole story: it seems flat. The horrors and the emotions don’t seem enough for Lily’s experiences. This may be deliberate but, after the initial set up, I was anticipating something Dickensian, and I got neither the sweep of feelings or pathos and certainly no humour associated with his novels. The only similarity came from the way the plot wandered down tangential alleyways – a failed escape by Lily and her friend Bridget from Coram and Lily’s visit with Belle to the opera, for example. Dickens followed these type of strands because he was writing sections of the story for a magazine published monthly whereas here it felt a little like padding.
Tremain is too good a writer for me not to get bound up with Lily’s struggle to cope with her deep psychological need to confess her crime. There were also important ideas explored about the damaging effect on someone of abandonment, guilt and childhood trauma. The exploration did not seem to me, though, to be that deep and the story also seemed rather slight.