Bluethroat Morning [Hardcover]

Jacqui Lofthouse (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2000

Alison Bliss, world-famous model and author of "Sweet Susan", walks into the sea on a 'bluethroat morning' and becomes a greater icon in death than in life. However, six years later when her husband Harry returns to the site of her death with 19-year-old Helen, he discovers an unusual mystery.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Six years ago, Harry Bliss's wife Alison, former model and acclaimed author, walked into the sea. She left behind a brief note and a pile of ashes-- all that remained of the novel in which she had immersed herself for months. Oddly captivated by an old sepia photograph of Harry's great-grandfather Charles and his second wife Arabella, Alison was intent on creating a narrative for and about them. As she wrote in her journal, "Think of the striations of the rock at Marsden. No longer shifting of subterranean, the rock now solid; made permanent. The sea's erosion has revealed the layering of time; the pattern beneath the surface. So my imagination must erode the past. The form of the art-work has simply to be revealed."

But what happened when that revelation occurred? What parallels between past and present, self and art, did she find? Harry had been only vaguely aware of Alison's project. Shell-shocked by her suicide, he is only just beginning to emerge from a haze of grief and confusion when he meets Helen, a young woman who looks disturbingly like Arabella. The resemblance spurs both Harry and Helen-- who naively idolizes Alison--to try to unravel the fascination that that photograph held for her, and in doing so, to lay to rest the guilt that haunts Harry. But in traveling to Glaven, the tiny town where Alison spent her final weeks, Harry finds himself caught in a gossamer web of coincidence. As a 90- year-old villager tells Harry, Arabella had drowned herself as well. Harry's growing awareness of the tragic history Alison had discovered underscores his own attempts to understand his wife's last days.

The novel purports to be an exploration of the intersection of female self and literary self. And indeed, the questions at which it hints are in the traditional realm of feminist scholarship: What is the relationship between creativity and fertility? How do female artists reject or subvert a patriarchal system of authority? Must daughters tell their mothers' stories?

But why, then, is Harry's voice the loudest of all? Melodramatically anguished, but undeniably self-complacent, he reigns supreme over the novel, reducing all others to two-dimensional ciphers. Were there any awareness that Harry's obsession has nothing to do with his wife and everything to do with himself, the novel could be a fascinating indictment of the ways in which female creativity can be filtered and muted by a male audience. But both Harry and author Jacqui Lofthouse (The Temple of Hymen) play things perfectly straight. When Harry pouts, upon reading Alison's journal, the reader is expected to sympathize with his self-absorption: "She was intent on her journey but her ultimate goal was obscure. Only one thing was clear: I was not a part of it. At her death, a great chasm of silence opened in my heart. But Alison, in her last notebook, did not pause to contemplate my loss."

When Alison finally speaks for herself in those journal pages, her words are vigorous and devastating, putting Harry's self-absorbed rambling to shame. What a pity, then, that her words are so few. They hint at what her unfinished novel might have been. More ironically, they hint at what Lofthouse's own text could have become. --Kelly Flynn --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Lofthouse's second novel, after The Temple of Hymen, is an intelligently crafted but uninspired psychological suspense story, a whydunit about the suicide of a woman who seemed to have little reason to kill herself. Six years after the death of his young wife, one-time supermodel Alison Oakley, 58-year-old Harry Bliss walks out on his London teaching job barely a week before he is due to retire. He is determined to visit Glaven, the small English town where Alison lived before she walked into the ocean one "bluethroat morning," and discover what exactly led up to her death. After a descent into anorexia at the end of her modeling career, Alison recovered by writing a bestselling, prize-winning novel about the modeling industry. Around the same time, she met and married Harry, who gave her the time and privacy to write. Though bestsellerdom proved nearly as stressful as supermodeldom, Alison had retreated to Glaven and was working apace on her next novel, when she apparently destroyed her manuscript and took her life. Why? Harry is not alone in his quest. He is accompanied by Helen Cregar, the 19-year-old daughter of his best friend and the only woman who has interested him since his wife's death, and followed by hangers-on, journalists and even another academic. The clues Harry needs most are given up slowly by nonagenarian Ern Higham, who teaches Harry about white-throated and blue-throated birds and keeps safe one of Alison's last possessions. Lofthouse convincingly captures Harry's fusty and sorrowful presence, and the passages from Alison's perspective are engaging and penetrating. But no matter how skillfully Lofthouse manages the revelations of her multiple parallel stories, her voice is muted and the narrative lacks resonance. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 387 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Pub Ltd; 1st Us Edition edition (August 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074754834X
• ISBN-13: 978-0747548348
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,984,989 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Initially engaging, but ultimately disappointing., December 1, 2000

By 

"hphantom" (Moraga, California USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Bluethroat Morning (Hardcover)

Unfortunately, despite its literary deftness, this psychological suspense/mystery novel is like so many others of its type, i.e., it builds up the reader's expectations to a high pitch, and then peters out at its conclusion, as if the author had simply run out of ideas/interest/time, and decided just to be done with the thing.

I heartily concur with the previous reviewers regarding Ms. Lofthouse's exceptional writing talent, but it is wasted here. Her plot revolves around the efforts of Harry, the widower of Alison, a famous model who had abandoned the fashion world to become a novelist, to discover the reason(s) for her suicide and to come to terms with it. Complicating Harry's search for answers are Alison's posthumous idealization by the reading public and a relentless media scrutiny, coupled with the fact she went to her death in the same manner and at the same place as did an ancestress of Harry's, who also happened to be the subject of Alison's current novel-in-progress at the time of her death.

While I generally feel that the most compelling fictional characters are those who are portrayed as flawed, just like regular folks, Ms. Lofthouse's cast is primarily a self-centered, self-seeking, whining bunch. I am old enough to have witnessed the human wreckage and waste that has been left in the wake of those who lived by the '60's slogan, "If it feels good, do it," and am disappointed to find it alive and well, albeit in a fictional tale. Frankly, by the time I reached the conclusion, I would not have minded if a few more of these people had walked into the ocean so that they could not inflict any more pain those around them.

Lastly, a pet peeve -- I find it extremely irritating when a writer with an exceptional command of language resorts to using male locker room vocabulary to refer to male and female anatomy, sexual activity, etc., especially when it occurs in a third-person narrative format, as it does in this case. Judging by her novel as a whole, Ms. Lofthouse can certainly do better than that.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic., June 17, 2004

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Bluethroat Morning (Hardcover)

Jacqui Lofthouse, Bluethroat Morning (Bloomsbury, 2001)

Jacqui Lofthouse's second novel has faded into obscurity at an amazing rate (Amazon will still let you add it to your cart, but when it comes to actually shipping the thing...). This is truly a travesty of justice, for Bluethroat Morning is the best literary mystery I've read in a very long time.

Harry Bliss' wife, Alison, committed suicide six years ago by the rather odd method of stripping, walking into the ocean, and drowning. It takes a lot to drown yourself while not weighted down. (Try it sometime.) His life since has been almost cloistered, nothing but work and sleep. Until, that is, he meets his best friend's daughter, a nineteen-year-old who happens to bear a striking resemblance to Harry's grandfather's second wife, about whom Alison's second novel was going to be about before she killed herself in the middle of writing it. Helen, the daughter, is vicariously attracted to Harry through being one of Alison's legion of fans; it's almost inevitable the two of them begin a torrid affair. This is the lynchpin that drives Harry to the understanding that he must find out what happened in the two weeks before Alison's death, while she was on working holiday at the resort town of Glaven, in order to get on with his own life.

Bluethroat Morning is plotted with such an intricacy that the reader will start seeing symbolism in every word (how much of it is red herring I will leave to you to discover) and start reading ominous gestures into every action taken by every character, major or minor. The subplots and various threads of the mystery are skillfully woven, with nothing left unresolved at any point and every character eventually finding a use, even the red herrings. All this combines with Lofthouse's easy economy with words and direct approach to the subject matter to create a book both complex and readable, not an easy thing to find. Hovers a little on the "tell" side of "show, don't tell" now and again, but that's the book's only flaw (and it is a minor one; never more than a few toes over the line). Absolutely astonishing, and highly recommended. A candidate for the year's ten best reads list. ****

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Under a Spell, October 27, 2001

By 

Susan Kerr (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Bluethroat Morning (Hardcover)

Other reviews have outlined Harry's search into the suicide of his novelist (shades of Plath) and ex-model (shades of Kate Moss?) wife, so I will leap to my conclusions. As things narrow down to old man Ern (the keeper of secrets), factors and facts about the past begin to pull together, and I came completely under this Bluethroat Morning's spell.
I was gripped not only by the storyline but by some magic of the narrative voice. There is something of John Fowles's The Magus about it: a man, set apart, seeking in a strange isolated setting, worlds within worlds, time within time, though without The Magus's conspiracy element or high mythology. Even the protagonist has similarities.. an egocentric, self-pitying, sex-solves-things guy... yet I was still hooked on his search. The evocation of Norfolk and area is brilliant, Ern is a superb character, and the boat scene and climactic scene at Ern's cottage complete with ancient clocks, an obsessive newspaper collection and glass cases full of eerie stuffed birds -- wow. I was less enthralled with Alison herself, what we knew of her; perhaps she deserves a novel of her own?
Lofthouse isn't afraid to create lush, nearly gothic settings and makes them a good and believable read. I agree with some of the customer reviews that some of the overwriting or repetition could be edited down, but forgive this because I was grateful and intrigued to read a book that, quite simply, got me and wouldn't let go.