Life and death on the margins

FICTIONThe spell cast by Alice Sebold's new novel begins in the very first sentence: "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." The positioning of those 11 words, so deliberate, yet tossed with the ease of dice spilling from a cup, establish the tone.

The narrator, Helen, has reached a point of no return, and she knows it. All that remains is retracing the journey that brought her to such a level of numbed lucidity. As a story it is sad, even horrific. As an outstanding piece of writing, it is exhilarating, unforgettable. There is a forensic ease about the prose that simply insists every sentence is weighted and committed to memory.

This is a remarkable novel in which every word is vital, each nuance felt, and all the more impressive considering that it follows a widely praised, if over-rated fiction debut, The Lovely Bones (2002). Despite its success it is a calculating, unconvincing and sentimentalised novel one either loved - and many did - or hated. An international bestseller, The Lovely Bones always looked set to be the movie it is currently in the process of becoming. It was published three years after Sebold's Lucky - a Memoir of Rape, an account of a brutal attack she suffered as a university student.

Having disliked The Lovely Bones so much, narrated as it is by a murdered rape victim who watches on from Heaven as her family cope with not only her death, but the failure to find her body of which only an elbow remains, I almost did not read this one. That would have been my loss. The Almost Moon, comparable to Jeffrey Eugenides's outstanding debut, The Virgin Suicides (1993), is a candid, gut wrenching, at times horribly funny and often beautifully touching exploration of one woman's realisation that her life has been swallowed, or rather cancelled.

Just as the young rape and murder victim describes her killing with detached recall - in what is the strongest sequence in The Lovely Bones - Helen sets it all down. While The Lovely Bones is ultimately about the murdered girl's emerging sexuality, The Almost Moon is about an entire identity that has been stolen and recast into something superficially acceptable.

The genius which guides The Almost Moon is its absolute, horrible multiple truths; its staggering clarity. Every word uttered by Helen Knightly resounds with her candid bewilderment. Here is a woman so alert to sensation that she can imagine a neighbour's whispers catching "my ankles like ropes."

At 49, with two grown daughters and a failed marriage, she exists in the shadow cast by her adored dead father and a mother who has dominated her every waking moment. A regime of dieting and exercise has given Helen an element of surface routine but it has not freed her from the hell of her mind. The sheer skill with which Sebold leads damaged, deconstructed Helen through a 24-hour odyssey following a crime that just seemed to happen is staggering. The details are provided by the relentless memories that bombard Helen while in flight from the final exasperation that ends in the bizarre killing.

It seems so simple. Likeable, demented, despairing Helen arrives at her mother's house, only to discover that her mother, then 88 and physically helpless although still in command of a cruel tongue, has soiled herself. The effort to half lift, half drag her mother to the bathroom develops into an epic struggle. Helen has lived on the edge of reality, always caught up in a sequence of simmering disasters; she has never made choices, just fallen into developments that have become realities. Her mother, Clair, beautiful and demanding, had become a monstrous, helpless infant long before her body has collapsed.

"My clues to my mother's life before me," explains Helen, "were not many. It took me a while to notice that almost all of them - the Steuben glass paperweights, the sterling silver picture frames, the Tiffany rattles that were sent a dozen strong before she miscarried her first, then second, child - were chipped or dented, cracked or blackened in various ways. Almost all of them had been or would be thrown either at a wall or at my father who ducked with a reflexive agility . . . My father's grace had developed in proportion to my mother's violence . . ."

Page by page Helen's story simply oozes out, her present predicament, her unpremeditated despatch of her mother interspersed with the relentless flow of memories, most touching of all, snap-shot images of her grown daughters as children. The elder girl, Emily, is now married with children of her own and has distanced herself from Helen for many reasons, but mainly because of Clair. It was Clair who allowed Emily's son, Leo, to fall while she was holding him.

THE POWER OF the narrative is sustained by Helen's voice, coherent, exact and quite obviously still just about the right side of sanity. Sebold brilliantly succeeds in conveying the sense of numbed panic that has overwhelmed Helen. At times it is as if Helen is caught up in some appalling dream and is watching herself go through a series of crazily connected episodes. After killing her mother she knows she needs help in moving the body and tries to contact her former husband, Jake, an artist who now travels the world making commissioned sculptures of earth and ice.

She tracks him down through one of his former colleagues and gets his number but doesn't call. When the phone suddenly rings in her mother's house, it is Jake who has been alerted by the colleague. Helen is surprised. "I couldn't get you at your house," explains Jake, "and I still have your mother's number in my address book. How are you?"

The dialogue, pitched between the surreal and the practical, is somehow incredibly believable. Again and again, no matter how crazy it seems, Sebold makes this novel as real as a meal on the table.

On hearing that his former mother-in-law is dead, and that Helen is alone with her, he says: "Oh, Jesus! You need to call someone, Helen. What happened? You need to hang up the phone and dial 911. Are you sure she's dead?" Helen confirms this and then in one of the many instances throughout the book when Helen reacts as if she is watching a drama being played out on a big screen, speaks directly to herself or to the listener - the reader - to whom she is confiding: "I wanted to get off the phone and enter the nowhere state I'd just been in, where no one knew anything and my mother and I were alone together. There was no easy way to say what came next."

Jake's arrival at the scene does not make the situation any easier for Helen; it merely increases the flow of memory. But while he has been busy, arranging to catch a flight to bring him across the US to meet her, Helen engages in a highly charged sexual encounter with her best friend's son. It is all consistent with her unravelling. Without ever turning her narrative into a lament, Helen explains everything, even her own reflex actions, and reflex they are. She works as a nude model for art students, nowhere as glamorous as her mother's short-lived career as a lingerie model, but still it is modelling and compensates for the hurt suffered the moment long ago when Jake no longer wanted to draw her.

This is a narrative of intent, it never falters. There are also superb set pieces. Helen recalls the day a neighbourhood boy got killed. He had stayed home sick from school but had not been too sick to ride his bike. As he lay dying on the road, Clair watched, incapable of helping him. Her failure to call for help causes the family to be ostracised by the neighbours. As Helen remembers the incident she reflects of the dead boy: "I've always wondered what he must have thought during those final minutes as my mother stood so close to him. How could the world change so fast? Could he know, at eight, what death was? Cars came out of nowhere and hit you two houses down from where you had grown up, and a woman who had always seemed just a typical adult, in those rare moments you saw her in her yard, stood at the edge of the road but did not comfort you?"

All the while like a river flowing through the story is Helen's love for her father who, having served his wife as if it were a prison sentence, quietly kills himself. Helen carries that grief, just as she assumed his job, that of caring for Clair. Late in the novel Helen meets her younger daughter, Sarah, at the train station only then to quickly slip away from her in order to complete the final stage of her odyssey that concludes next door to her mother's house. Sarah is none too normal either having absorbed so much anger and hurt. No matter how shocking the story, tragic the revelations, Sebold never loses control. The book is not about violence in America; essentially it is about the violence in all of us. Helen is an Everywoman walking on glass and The Almost Moon is what happens when a writer can summon the language to meet the tale.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Alice Sebold follows her international bestseller with a superior, brilliantly written dark tale The Almost Moon By Alice Sebold Picador, 291pp. £16.99