“Life was strange at Maenordy.” So begins the description of life for six-year-old Gillian Davis and her younger brother at the manor house in a remote Welsh village, where they are sent from their home in Swansea to escape the Blitz.
Maenordy is oppressive. They must be quiet and not do anything to annoy the lady of the house. Everything in the village school is in Welsh, which Gillian knows little of. However, free to roam the woods and fields, she and her brother carve their own world to survive, retreating often to a room of bales they create in a corner of the barn. When Angus, the family’s eighteen-year-old son, comes home from boarding school for the holidays, he befriends them. To Gillians’s growing unease, Angus begins touching her and creating opportunities for them to be alone.
Angus’s sexual molestation of Gillian forms the pivotal event in Sonia Tilson’s debut novel, The Monkey Puzzle Tree. The novel begins when Gillian, now a grandmother living in Ottawa, Canada, returns to Wales to visit her dying mother, determined to talk to her mother about what happened to her as a child. She has not visited Wales since she left as a young woman. The novel alternates between the present and the past, as memories are triggered by events and people during her visit.
Sonia Tilson was born in Swansea, Wales. She was a young child during World War II. In 1964, she came to Canada, where she has taught English at various levels, mostly in Ottawa. Similarities between the author’s life and that of her heroine Gillian may lead people to assume the novel is autobiographical, to which Sonia responds (in the publisher’s press materials), “The important thing is that what happened in the book happened to somebody, to whom in particular is not really important. Moreover, everything is either fictional or fictionalized – so that nothing is exactly what happened to me and much of it never happened to me at all.”
The novel flows in a clean, straightforward storytelling style. I was quickly pulled into the life of young Gillian, experiencing a British child’s World War II through her eyes. The older Gillian is initially less compelling. Although her mother’s reception, greeting her with “My goodness, you’ve aged!” is not particularly warm or welcoming, Gillian’s irritation with her mother seems out of proportion and incongruent with her own assessment of the situation, which reads as if she has come to terms with the past without any remaining anger or guilt.
“She owed it to her mother, as well as to herself, to try to turn that deeply buried stone. If she succeeded, it could help explain the reserve and even hostility she had always shown to her mother, which she knew must have made her hard to love. Possibly she could hear her mother’s side of the story too; why she had kept her daughter at arms’ length throughout her whole life.”
As the novel progresses, the adult Gillian becomes more rounded and believable. And we discover she is not as reconciled with the past as it first seemed.
The novel transitions easily between present and past, without confusion. At times I feel the author actually goes too far to make it clear she is leading into a flashback, instead of trusting the reader to figure it out. Still, the transitions work. The flashbacks, always connected to something Gillian encounters in the present, occur in chronological order. We see her life unfold.
Upon arrival at Maenordy, Gillian’s mother tells the children “Take care of each other, sweethearts, and be sure never to do anything to make me ashamed of you.” And so, Gillian says nothing to her parents about her molestation. After a year at Maenordy, Gillian and her brother move in with their grandparents in a village six miles from Swansea. It is still not considered safe enough for them to return home. They remain at their grandparents until the end of the war.
School, friends and childhood play are part of Gillian’s life here. It seems as if the events at Maenordy are a thing of the past. Shortly after the war, Gillian and her brother are sent to separate boarding schools. The events at Maenordy aren’t completely buried and they resurface, colouring Gillian’s reaction to dorm discussions about boys, biology class explanations of reproduction, her first sexual intimacies at university, and her adult relationships with men.
The men in Gillian’s life are an odd lot. They include a magnetic, adventure-seeking political activist, a sloppy, self-absorbed artist who isolates her from the rest of her world, and a tidy, routine-driven scientist interested only in his work. Appearing almost as caricatures, they illustrate Gillian’s lack of self-esteem and her vulnerability.
During her stay in Wales to be with her dying mother, Gillian learns she was not Angus’s only victim. She discovers her mother has her own secrets. Gillian never does tell her mother about what happened at Maenordy and says she is okay with that. When she returns home after her mother’s death, anger consumes her. The emotion in this section of the book is raw and intense. Here is the emotion I’d expected from Gillian earlier in the book. The anger takes her back to Wales again, this time to confront her abuser.
A monkey puzzle tree is a large evergreen native to parts of South America. It began to be cultivated in Britain in the 1800s. Its leaves are stiff and sharp, and the branches sweep upward in a reptilian look. It got its name when an Englishman commented that it would be a puzzle for a monkey to climb. There is a monkey puzzle tree at Maenordy. Upon seeing it, Gillian’s mother says, “How unusual! Isn’t that nice! Aren’t you lucky children to be coming to a lovely place like this?” The branches of the tree block the view out the window in the bedroom Gillian and her brother share. She wonders what would happen to a monkey caught in its branches. “Would it be able to get out? Is that the puzzle?”
The monkey puzzle tree in Gillian’s final visit to Maenordy is not what it had been. “Lower limbs had been chopped off, the remaining branches had lost their manic thrust.” When asked what one thing she’d like the reader to take away from the story, Sonia Tilson says, “Face your demons.” When Gillian faces her demons at the end of the book, the reader is left with a mixture of satisfaction and sadness at the many lives, which although not completely destroyed, were less than they might have been. But Gillian has finally made her way out of the monkey puzzle tree.
In The Monkey Puzzle Tree, Sonia Tilson gently leads us through neutral narrative into paragraphs of deep emotion. She never leaves us there for long, moving on to other events and people in the story, making this a very readable book. She is currently working on a novel about a young Canadian boy, to which I look forward.
Biblioasis| 256 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927428122
‘The Monkey Puzzle Tree’ by Sonia Tilson
Book Reviews
“Life was strange at Maenordy.” So begins the description of life for six-year-old Gillian Davis and her younger brother at the manor house in a remote Welsh village, where they are sent from their home in Swansea to escape the Blitz.
Maenordy is oppressive. They must be quiet and not do anything to annoy the lady of the house. Everything in the village school is in Welsh, which Gillian knows little of. However, free to roam the woods and fields, she and her brother carve their own world to survive, retreating often to a room of bales they create in a corner of the barn. When Angus, the family’s eighteen-year-old son, comes home from boarding school for the holidays, he befriends them. To Gillians’s growing unease, Angus begins touching her and creating opportunities for them to be alone.
Angus’s sexual molestation of Gillian forms the pivotal event in Sonia Tilson’s debut novel, The Monkey Puzzle Tree. The novel begins when Gillian, now a grandmother living in Ottawa, Canada, returns to Wales to visit her dying mother, determined to talk to her mother about what happened to her as a child. She has not visited Wales since she left as a young woman. The novel alternates between the present and the past, as memories are triggered by events and people during her visit.
Sonia Tilson was born in Swansea, Wales. She was a young child during World War II. In 1964, she came to Canada, where she has taught English at various levels, mostly in Ottawa. Similarities between the author’s life and that of her heroine Gillian may lead people to assume the novel is autobiographical, to which Sonia responds (in the publisher’s press materials), “The important thing is that what happened in the book happened to somebody, to whom in particular is not really important. Moreover, everything is either fictional or fictionalized – so that nothing is exactly what happened to me and much of it never happened to me at all.”
The novel flows in a clean, straightforward storytelling style. I was quickly pulled into the life of young Gillian, experiencing a British child’s World War II through her eyes. The older Gillian is initially less compelling. Although her mother’s reception, greeting her with “My goodness, you’ve aged!” is not particularly warm or welcoming, Gillian’s irritation with her mother seems out of proportion and incongruent with her own assessment of the situation, which reads as if she has come to terms with the past without any remaining anger or guilt.
“She owed it to her mother, as well as to herself, to try to turn that deeply buried stone. If she succeeded, it could help explain the reserve and even hostility she had always shown to her mother, which she knew must have made her hard to love. Possibly she could hear her mother’s side of the story too; why she had kept her daughter at arms’ length throughout her whole life.”
As the novel progresses, the adult Gillian becomes more rounded and believable. And we discover she is not as reconciled with the past as it first seemed.
The novel transitions easily between present and past, without confusion. At times I feel the author actually goes too far to make it clear she is leading into a flashback, instead of trusting the reader to figure it out. Still, the transitions work. The flashbacks, always connected to something Gillian encounters in the present, occur in chronological order. We see her life unfold.
Upon arrival at Maenordy, Gillian’s mother tells the children “Take care of each other, sweethearts, and be sure never to do anything to make me ashamed of you.” And so, Gillian says nothing to her parents about her molestation. After a year at Maenordy, Gillian and her brother move in with their grandparents in a village six miles from Swansea. It is still not considered safe enough for them to return home. They remain at their grandparents until the end of the war.
School, friends and childhood play are part of Gillian’s life here. It seems as if the events at Maenordy are a thing of the past. Shortly after the war, Gillian and her brother are sent to separate boarding schools. The events at Maenordy aren’t completely buried and they resurface, colouring Gillian’s reaction to dorm discussions about boys, biology class explanations of reproduction, her first sexual intimacies at university, and her adult relationships with men.
The men in Gillian’s life are an odd lot. They include a magnetic, adventure-seeking political activist, a sloppy, self-absorbed artist who isolates her from the rest of her world, and a tidy, routine-driven scientist interested only in his work. Appearing almost as caricatures, they illustrate Gillian’s lack of self-esteem and her vulnerability.
During her stay in Wales to be with her dying mother, Gillian learns she was not Angus’s only victim. She discovers her mother has her own secrets. Gillian never does tell her mother about what happened at Maenordy and says she is okay with that. When she returns home after her mother’s death, anger consumes her. The emotion in this section of the book is raw and intense. Here is the emotion I’d expected from Gillian earlier in the book. The anger takes her back to Wales again, this time to confront her abuser.
A monkey puzzle tree is a large evergreen native to parts of South America. It began to be cultivated in Britain in the 1800s. Its leaves are stiff and sharp, and the branches sweep upward in a reptilian look. It got its name when an Englishman commented that it would be a puzzle for a monkey to climb. There is a monkey puzzle tree at Maenordy. Upon seeing it, Gillian’s mother says, “How unusual! Isn’t that nice! Aren’t you lucky children to be coming to a lovely place like this?” The branches of the tree block the view out the window in the bedroom Gillian and her brother share. She wonders what would happen to a monkey caught in its branches. “Would it be able to get out? Is that the puzzle?”
The monkey puzzle tree in Gillian’s final visit to Maenordy is not what it had been. “Lower limbs had been chopped off, the remaining branches had lost their manic thrust.” When asked what one thing she’d like the reader to take away from the story, Sonia Tilson says, “Face your demons.” When Gillian faces her demons at the end of the book, the reader is left with a mixture of satisfaction and sadness at the many lives, which although not completely destroyed, were less than they might have been. But Gillian has finally made her way out of the monkey puzzle tree.
In The Monkey Puzzle Tree, Sonia Tilson gently leads us through neutral narrative into paragraphs of deep emotion. She never leaves us there for long, moving on to other events and people in the story, making this a very readable book. She is currently working on a novel about a young Canadian boy, to which I look forward.
Biblioasis| 256 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1927428122