288 pages, Kindle edition
Review by Marc Nash
Disclosure: I am Twitter friends with the
author. I bought the book rather than asking for a review copy, so this review
is freely given rather than solicited by the author.
Susan Strong is falling apart. Her being is
decaying like a radioactive isotope. A man from outer space called Fairly Dave plops
into her shower tray after squeezing through the showerhead from another
dimension. He has come to try and help restore her bodily and spiritual
integrity. For she is at the centre not only of her twin boys' universe, but of
the very universe itself. If she disappears, the universe likely will dissipate
with her.
In the same way she holds the universe
together, she is fighting to stem the perennial tide of domestic chaos, of
cleaning, laundry, cooking et al. But it is this humdrum existence that is at
the root cause of her disintegration, for somewhere in her unconscious she
doesn't feel whole, remaining unfulfilled with life. Her husband seems remote
and receding from her. With Fairly Dave as guide, she undergoes a series of
journeys through time and space to reintegrate parts of herself lost and
forgotten, or trapped as frozen memories or as less well defined traces such as
a smell or a sound. And in this scary new universe where anything can happen,
Wells ingeniously shows the mundane tools of the domestic to be persecutory
monsters stealing her energy and soul away, such as hoovers, fridge freezers,
garden gnomes and lost socks. Ironing boards however can go either way!
"Every day you are saving the universe from your kitchen sink," Dave
tells her, which is neatly double-edged, as she both keeps the universe orderly
through being stationed at her sink with Marigold gloves, and yet the kitchen
sink et al, are also revealed to be a threat requiring rescue from. She needs
liberating from the realm of the domestic.
Housewife with a Half-life is a charming, whimsical journey
through a world where the domestic meets hard science. However Wells has a very
light touch so as not to inundate the reader with the abstruse; science here is
often employed as a metaphor for other ways of seeing and conceptualising our
existence, flowing and dovetailing with the surreal world of dream imagery and
the very human traces of sights and smells recovered from childhood that have
stayed with us but lain buried like an archaeological seam. The book echoes
both Doctor Who and Douglas Adams, but its sensibility of a sickness of the
soul is I think handled in a more contemporary way. "After all these years
she realised that a supermarket trip was an occasion of mortal combat against
the forces of cynical consumerism".
There is a fair sprinkling of wondrous
passages of writing, not least describing the power of her husband's drum solo
as he too discovers a certain fading away brought about by pursuing a life that
didn't give vent to his suppressed dreams and aspirations. The one thing I
struggled with during the middle of the book, were some of the transitions
between the dreamlike travels and being back behind the sink in her house.
These switches may well have been deliberately intended to be vertiginous, but
they left me floundering trying to figure out what had just happened and what actual
dimension the characters were in. But this was a minor quibble really, as it
didn't stop the flow of the plot.
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