Customer Reviews

Every Day Is Mother's Day

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Don't be misled by the title: Every Day Is Mother's Day isn't an Erma Bombek type look at motherhood or a feminist polemic--it's the best "ghost story" I've ever read. It's sad, funny, macabre, and disturbing. I've read only one other book (Fludd) by this author so far, but she's already near the top of my list of favorite writers--maybe she'll be on yours, too.

People who have enjoyed Mantel's more gentle, humane novels like Experiment in Love or Change Of Climate might be surprised by the black comedy of this one. But I became weirdly fascinated in the characters, the occasionally chilling plot, the astringent prose and the biting humor from the outset. Immediately after I finished this book, I plunged into its sequel, Vacant Posession. But I don't recommend reading them when you're home alone at night. Mantel's decription of madness is so convincing, I briefly feared for my own sanity for a minute or two while reading it.

Mantel's unusual tale is intriguing, a contrast between the seemingly normal lives of neighbors on a quiet street, most unaware that an odd mother and daughter exist in quite another world, one where spirits inhabit the rooms as well as the residents. In 1970ss England, Evelyn Axon and her mentally-challenged daughter, Muriel, are an unusual pair. A medium, the widowed Evelyn is haunted by the spirits she calls upon for clients, her rambling, decaying house filled with the uninvited. The sly, observant Muriel, no longer a child, takes great pains to outwit Evelyn, who berates her daughter cruelly and often. Not surprising that the ungainly, uncommunicative Muriel is the predictable product of her bizarre environment. The hammering of various social welfare workers is met with silence from within, the Axon's recoiling from unwanted intrusion.

Isabel Field, the current social worker assigned the Axon's, is troubled by her inability to help this pair, judging her own efforts inadequate. But Isabel gets distracted by a short affair with married schoolteacher Colin Sidney, whose unhappy wife, Sylvia, can barely control the three children who fill her days with chaos, let alone track the movements of a boring husband. In a vague connection, Colin's unmarried sister, Florence, lives next door to Evelyn and Muriel, her tentative overtures of friendship quickly rebuffed. Coping with the disappointments of an unhappy marriage and the scant rewards of an illicit relationship, Isabel and the Sidney provide the face of everyday life as most of us experience it, Muriel and Evelyn the unpredictable, both victims and conspirators in a bureaucratic social network meant to help those in need.

Mantel explores both the light and the dark side of human existence, the mental aberration bred of dysfunction, the accidental exposure of a nightmare in the midst of a quiet neighborhood, where incipient tragedy festers in dark corners and the scent of decay is pervasive. The blundering Colin Sidney, the well-meaning Isabel and the helpful neighbor, Florence, are caught up in a contretemps with unforeseeable consequences as the tortured daughter of an unstable woman finds herself at the mercy of an unfamiliar world, institutionalized by a system that swallows the needy whole. Out of sight, out of mind, or is she? Luan Gaines/2010.

Hilary Mantel has done amazing writing in this novel. She catches the reader up in the lives of her characters. You can't help but have emotions when reading her novels

Hilary Mantel is an exceptional writer and this book almost defies description. It is the story of Evelyn Axon who is a spiritualist who will bring back the spirits of the dead to speak to the living. Unfortunately, these spirits don't want to leave her house once they have been called and thus the house is virtually full of sly manipulative evil ghosts. Yet, it is Mantel's great strength that we are never sure if there are ghosts in the house or whether Evelyn Axon has completely lost her mind. Her half-witted daughter, Muriel, lives in the house also and requires the supervision of a social work agency. Muriel becomes pregnant while in a day school for the mentally retarded and once again we are unsure if the staff or other students may have gotten her pregnant or whether the evil spirits lingering in the upstairs bedrooms may have impregnated her. Muriel's social worker is a plain woman with limited expectations, Isabel Field, who is having an affair with a middle-aged loser of a fellow, Colin Sidney. The story gets very complicated from this point onward but the strength of the book is not how pathetic many of the characters are but rather the outstanding language and black humor that Mantel uses to paint these characters in these awkward situations. Her view of mankind as expressed in the book is bleakly realistic about the limitations and foolishness of the human experience. As I read about these pitiful characters struggling for a tiny bit of joy in their limited lives, I found myself laughing out loud rather than crying due to Mantel's exceptional literary skills. Is this existentialism disguised as a black humor horror story? Probably so. However it is Mantel's gift that you don't see her fingerprints as she hides the philosophical under the humor and horror.

Hilary Mantel is one of a kind. She is inconcerned with surfaces and deals with the subconscious activity of the forces of Good and Evil, both of our own devising and of other realms of authority entirely. EVERY DAY IS MOTHER'S DAY is a story of incremental evil and madness loosed on a selectively perceiving world, the activity of the truly wicked being obscured by the preconceptions and the predilections of those who, sidelong and reluctant, observe it. One little horror engenders another, each larger than the last, until chaos is unleashed and, still, unappreciated for what it is, is embraced by those who are certain to become its next victims. This is a novel of real terror, and part of the horror is that it will make you laugh.

This is not the worst book I've ever read, but it is very close! It had potential to be a good read, but lacked in many key areas. The characters were fairly interesting and decently developed individually, but the outcome of all their interaction was not develped nearly enough. The entanglment of the characters had good plot potential, but ended up being VERY anticlimactic. I felt like the book was unfinished and probably needed at least another hundred pages or so to round out the characters and their situations. It even felt as if it was published exactly as the first draft was written, without any content editing, rewriting or further plot development. Every Day is Mother's Day is a book that had promise, but fell quite short of it's potential.