Soldier Sailor (2023)

Why this one?

I’m reading selected entries from the 2024 Women’s Prize Longlist. This was my first choice (aside from Western Lane, which I’d already covered as it was shortlisted for last year’s Booker) - largely because it seems to be the one that many people are least surprised to see on here.

Claire Kilroy (1973- ; active 2003- ) was born in Dublin, Ireland. She began writing fiction as a child, and studied English as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, returning later to complete an M.Phil in Creative Writing. She worked as an assistant editor on the BBC series Ballykissangel while writing her first novel All Summer, published by Faber & Faber in 2003. Her debut won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. She followed this with Tenderwire (2006), which was shortlisted for several more Irish fiction prizes; All The Names Have Been Changed (2009) and The Devil I Know (2012). Soldier Sailor (pub. 2023) is her first book in over ten years, dealing with some of her own experiences of motherhood in the interim (which she also spoke about in a 2015 essay, "F for Phone").

Thoughts, etc.

Soldier Sailor is a brief but intense novel told by a mother (the titular ‘Soldier’) and addressed to her son (who she calls ‘Sailor’). Its not entirely clear from what remove it’s being written - the narrative jumps around so much that it’s hard to be certain - but it focuses on Sailor’s first two or three years of life, during which the narrator is practically fighting for survival as she struggles with the everyday demands of motherhood. She is left, like so many mothers, bearing virtually all of the work of bringing up her son, while her husband goes to work, watches football, and - most egregiously of all - sleeps. Through a series of traumatic vignettes (none more so than the novel’s opening section - in which she briefly abandons her child, having written a suicide note to him) we learn of Soldier’s despairing sense of alienation from the previous version of herself, who she sees as lost to the all-consuming mother who has replaced her. Throughout, though, there is also a near-unbearable sense of the desperate love of mother for child, culminating in a lyrical, beautiful final section in which Soldier contemplates their inevitable future separation: in spite of all the trauma of the present moment, the real source of fear in her life.

This is a book that arrived at a particularly sensitive time for me - I’m the father of an almost one-year-old son, and so much in here felt like dispatches from our current reality as parents. (There’s an incident involving Calpol that I was pretty sure I was remembering from my own recent past until I read a review which reminded me that it actually happened a few chapters earlier in this book!) It’s a difficult book to read as a father - initially it’s sorely tempting to look at Soldier’s absolute horrorshow of an absent husband, the embodiment of the ‘dick’ father that Soldier spends much of the book railing against, and say ‘that’s not me, I’m better than that’ - barely a step away from screaming ‘not ALL men!’ like a demented Twitter troll. But as you go through the book it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend that you’re not - as a man - in some way guilty of (at the very least) some of what Kilroy is talking about in here. You may have not retreated straight back to the safety of late nights at the office; you may be capable of at least some basic dadding skills and utilize them more than once a week; but you still have the odds stacked in your favour by centuries of expectation and deliberate weighting of the system in your favour. Crucially, should you want to behave like Soldier’s husband - either full-time or just for an hour or two now and then, society practically gives you a free pass to do so. You have that option - thanks to a combination of biology and patriarchy - that Soldier and women like her really do not. When Soldier’s old friend arrives on the scene, a gem of a father by comparison, staying at home doing the dadding full-time while his high-flying doctor wife gets to go to work (note it’s likely capitalism dictating this scenario, rather than the goodness of idealised dad friend’s heart), he’s presented - not without logic - as an anomaly. He’s both sorely out of place - in the playground, ‘like a man who’s accidentally wandered into the women’s changing room, which in effect he had’ (I paraphrase - I’m terrible at noting quotations!) - and at times, it seems, illusory (was he ever really there in the first place? we wonder).

It’s a book that’s clearly hit a massive nerve with mothers due to its unnerving verisimilitude and fierce honesty, but it’s also one that should be required reading for fathers and potential fathers. It’s at times a punishing read, and not always an enjoyable one, but it’s immensely thought-provoking and will provoke a fair amount of soul-searching in any reasonable dad. All of this does conspire to make Soldier Sailor sound like something of a joyless, didactic read, but there’s so many more layers to it than that. For all the chaos his presence has sown in his mother’s world, her unwavering love for Sailor is obvious throughout and by the end of the book we come to see why. As the fog begins to lift in Soldier’s narration, we get to see her son in detail for the first time: an adorable toddler, running around in his Superman suit, getting words wrong, loving ugly puppies and doing all the irritating but adorable things our kids do. It’s a book that reflects the utterly desperate seeming moments of parenthood but also quietly celebrates what makes it all worthwhile, and in its virtuoso final section, encourages us to appreciate what we have - however impossible it may seem at the time - while we have it.

Score

9

A book that takes a well-trodden subject and, through incredible mastery of language and unflinching honesty, produces something fresh and vital. I can absolutely see why this has attracted the plaudits it already has, and would not be remotely surprised if it were to take home this year’s Prize.

Next up

Megan Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings.