Study for Obedience
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
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2.9 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023
NAMED AS ONE OF GRANTA MAGAZINE'S BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 2023
A powerful, compressed masterwork for fans of Shirley Jackson and Claire-Louise Bennett
A woman moves from the place of her birth to a remote northern country to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. The youngest child of many siblings - more than she cares to remember - from earliest childhood she has attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion. The country, it transpires, is the country of their family's ancestors, an obscure though reviled people.
Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly-born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; the containment of domestic fowl; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed particularly in her case. What is clear is that she is being accused of wrongdoing, but in a language she cannot understand and so cannot address. And however diligently and silently she toils in service of the community, still she feels their hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property...
Customer Reviews
Too clever for me
The author is Canadian by birth but now lives and teaches in Scotland. She writes poetry as well as prose fiction and is on Granta's list of Best of Young British Novelists. This book was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker when I read it.
An unnamed woman moves from her unnamed country of birth to a distant land, also unnamed, where she doesn’t speak the language, to look after her brother, whose wife has left him. It’s not hard to understand why because he quickly turns his sister into a virtual slave.
A series of unexplained, and unwanted, adverse events affect local domestic animals and crops. Locals grow increasingly suspicious that it’s our gal’s fault. No one actually says “She’s a witch; burn her,” but that’s the vibe. Or at least that’s the vibe her brother is pushing.
No one says anything much, in fact. It’s all very stream of consciousness-y, interior monologue-y writing that’s beautiful, but far too focussed on minutiae for my liking, which is why I’m unlikely to be invited onto any literary judging panels before Hell freezes over.