Customer Reviews

Wish Her Safe at Home (New York Review Books)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm conflicted about whether or not to recommend Wish Her Safe at Home. On the one hand, the author does a brilliant job of putting the reader inside the head of a mentally ill woman, and showing us how everything she says and does seems perfectly reasonable when seen from her point of view (while at the same time making us see what her behavior must look like to other people). On the other hand, the view from inside that head is necessarily a very constricted one, and after a while I found that Rachel's affected speech patterns and odd mannerisms began to seem repetitive and monotonous.

Of course, it's possible that what I saw as a flaw in the book is actually an example of the author's skill in depicting the behavior of the mentally ill, which must often seem repetitive and monotonous to those who are forced to witness it. All I can say, however, is that, long before the end of the book, I groaned impatiently whenever Rachel dropped another curtsey, or sang a snippet of another obscure show tune, or uttered another "I thankee, sir!"

I thought at first that this problem (if it is a problem) might have been solved if the story had been written as a short story rather than a novel. But I eventually decided that compressing the story wouldn't have worked, because the action is so carefully paced -- at first, Rachel seems a bit weird, but no more so than many people; by the middle of the book, it's clear that she has serious mental health issues (to use today's jargon); and by the end, she's obviously barking mad -- that it needed to be spread out over the course of a full-length novel.

In the end, I concluded that Wish Her Safe at Home is a brilliant technical exercise that doesn't quite succeed in being a satisfying novel. But the book is interesting enough that the best advice I can give about it is to say, read it yourself and make up your own mind about it.

Rachel Waring is a middle-aged, plain and common English woman stuck in a dead-end job she hates in 1980. Her best friend is her bitter, chain-smoking roommate. She has never been in love, never been married, both her parents are dead and she has very few friends. Thus, when she receives notice that she inherited her great-aunt's beautiful old mansion in Bristol, Rachel is shocked and thrilled. She visits the house, falls in love with it, notes that it has one of those famous blue plaques on it signifying it was lived in by a (minor and no longer remembered) member of the anti-slavery movement. Confronted with the decision to either continue her real, drudging existence in London, or to create a new, exciting one in Bristol, Rachel chooses completely to go with the exciting one. Even though that way lies madness.

And one can't help but admire her for doing so. Her early allusions to her life thus far- painfully awkward and very lonely- make the reader cry out for her. The story is told entirely from Rachel's perspective. You are in her head the way that you are in your own, listening to the internal dialogue. Rachel is a masterfully written unreliable narrator. There are times when, like Rachel, you are not sure what she says aloud and what she says in her head.

Stephen Benatar's ability to write this novel points to what a fantastic writer he is. As readers, you have complete, unadulterated access to Rachel's thoughts. When she is uncomfortable, you are uncomfortable. When she is sad, you are sad. When she is rebuffed by someone to whom she tries to make an advance, you feel the sting, too. And that's what is so heartbreaking. Rachel tries so very hard to be happy and warm and friendly, but people avoid her. She has no close friends and those that are kind to her, the reader does not fully trust. Can anyone blame her for turning inwards to a fantasy world of her own making, where everything is perfect?
Rachel Waring is a woman who, after an awkward and lonely existence, decides to do something about her life and for a brief, perfect moment, succeeds completely. It's impossible not to cheer her on.

I highly, highly recommend this book. It takes place in the 1980s but to me, seemed to take place decades prior to then- I can't quite pinpoint why. The writing is wonderful and the characters are skillfully drawn. And I love, love, love an unreliable narrator!

I did not enjoy this book very much. Why the high rating? Because I believe it to be indisputably well-done. I think I'm the unappreciative one here, the Philistine; and I would definitely defer to the opinions of others.

The book concerns itself with a woman who has left her London flat in order to take up self-styled living arrangements in a large house in Bristol; and, thereafter, her slow disintegration for reasons not entirely clear. It's definitely worth reading for anyone who finds its "product description" interesting. Most interesting of all for anyone who enjoys it, the book bears a second reading -- or repeated readings -- because we eventually learn that the narrator is entirely unreliable and basically fabricating various elements of her existence.

The author is quite strict with his own form; we learn precious little of the reality surrounding Ms. Waring. In this novel, you have to pay close attention. Toward the end, descriptions of what she's wearing bring sudden, vivid realizations; descriptions of conversations which seem truncated give one some first clues that the narrator is being regarded oddly or warily by others. We are forced into the narrator's head by an elliptical writing style which is impressively (!) carried on throughout the novel. I kept thinking somehow that the author would falter in maintaining this writing style. He never, ever did; not once.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'd have liked less subtlety. It is, perhaps, the American in me. And the lack of subtlety I might have appreciated would not so nearly have recommended this book as a minor classic or future classic in its own right. Most assuredly, the book is worthy of a second read. I also couldn't relate to the character, no fault of the author's: He is male; she is female. He did this startlingly well. One imagines that Mr. Benatar might make a wonderful actor or a wonderful verbal storyteller.

There are moments when I definitely appreciated what had been accomplished. In this novel, you're on the inside looking out. And the next time you see certain types of people in the streets, you might think twice. I don't want to give anything away. But here, a studied execution and eye to detail make for art that's thought-provokingly worthy.

P.S. I loved the title.

WISH HER SAFE AT HOME

Wow! I absolutely loved this book. What a great read. You need to check this one out ---

We meet middle-aged Rachel Waring who leads a very dull and boring life. Living in the city, working a nowhere job, having no social life or friends, living with a rude roommate, Rachel's life is less than exciting. Suddenly out of the blue, Rachel inherits an old decaying mansion from her departed aunt. She goes to the small and quaint village of Bristol where the home is located for an inspection. She makes the snap decision to chuck it all and move to Bristol and restore the mansion to its former lovely self.

Rachel works hard, hires help, and gets the mansion back to all of its glory. She meets people in Bristol and you hope for the best for Rachel. You hope she will find friendship, happiness, fulfillment in her dreary little life. What happens instead is Rachel slowly but surely goes insane.

And the author tells the tale well. He has the reader inside of Rachel's mind; reading her thoughts, living out her actions, all the while rooting for Rachel and praying all will turn out well for her.

Rachel's stability goes from bad to worse. She befriends the man she hired to create her lovely gardens and he and his family become very important in Rachel's life. Rachel starts to slowly spiral into her world of madness and the beauty of the writing is that you never know when an event is real and actually happening or is the invention in Rachel's mind.

I pitied Rachel from the get-go and never stopped feeling sorry for her. She was a kind and gentle person and soon became arrogant and snobby, feeling she is better than most other people. She lives in her own self-created little fantasy world and everything there is wonderful for her. What made her loose her mind? What other roads could she have chosen to travel down that would have kept her sane? One thing is for sure, Rachel always believed in the kindness of strangers.

Rachel is that woman you see when you are shopping or dining out, who isn't quite right, who asks you where to locate an item and then doesn't stop talking to you and continues to follow you around the store, all the while not making quite enough sense. Talking enough to just make you very leary of her and wishing she would just go away. Rachel is like that -- the reader is always leary of what she will think or do next; however, I didn't want her to go away. I wanted only the best for her and hoped she would find happiness. Does Rachel find happiness? Does she find true happiness or the happiness of the insane? Read this wonderful book and find out. You will be glad that you did.

Also, the artwork on the cover is just perfect! What a spectacular cover!!!!!

Thank you.

Pam

Wish Her Safe At Home was at times funny, sometimes odd, a bit sad and sometimes disturbing.

Rachel Waring is in her mid-forties, lives in London, has a job she dislikes and rents an apartment with her outspoken, chain-smoking roommate.
When Rachel's aunt passes away and leaves her a mansion in Bristol, everyone expects Rachel to sell the large house or to rent it out, instead she decides to move in. She leaves London behind, much to her roomates dismay and dislike.
As the story flows, Rachel has flashbacks about her past, mostly about her mother. You get to know that her childhood wasn't an easy one. Her mother was overbearing and cold. She hints that her father molested her.

Once she arrives in Bristol, you see how she interacts with people she meets and their reactions toward her, which are sometimes strange and a bit detached. Rachel is also a bit innapropriate at times when speaking to others. You kind of get the sense that she doesn't fit in, and is awkward in social situations. She tends to try too hard to be funny, or friendly when dealing with others. You also get the feeling that her perception of things isn't really on point. It's almost like she lives in her own little world.
As the book flows the reader gets to see what is going on in Rachel's mind and it is a read that is really hard to put down, especially towards the end. There are a few 'OMG!' moments. One thing that really creeped me out about this book is that since Rachel is narrating the story, the reader is seeing it through her point of view. The reader can only guess as to what is actually happening.


I did find the book hard to follow during some parts and found myself re-reading certain bits, mostly because Rachel would flashback, then flashforward to the present time and conversation. At other times I would re-read passages just to savor them.

I recommend this book if you want to read something a little different. This is a story that begs to be discussed. It's the kind of book that haunts the reader long after the last page is turned.

Stephen Benatar's novel Wish Her Safe at Home is, according to John Carey's introduction, `an impressive study of [a] woman going quietly and genteelly crazy.' It is also a most engaging novel. There aren't too many novels whose every word delights and sends a shiver of recognition down the reader's spine. I found this to be a rare treat, a book that fascinated and amused from start to finish. It's leisurely pace seduces so that even the banal and everyday musings of an old lady provide insights not only into her heroic struggle with senility but into the way even the sanest of us build up fantasies to such an extent that for most of the time we are `not living in the real world.' It's reassuring to know that others are as nutty as oneself.

Only gradually does the reader come to realise that Rachel Waring, the narrator, is making a desperate effort to cling on to her sanity. Like all of us her mind flicks from fluid everyday concerns to reassuring and static pictures of the past.

The difference between the mad and the sane is that the mad cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy, that the mad inhabit both simultaneously. Ultimately Rachel, while sounding so eminently sensible and `on the ball' drifts towards the inevitable Home of the title. Rachel's private indulgence in wistful memory - as snatches of song and scenes from vintage movies drift through her mind - becomes increasingly accompanied by a desperate gaiety in public. She becomes a social embarrassment, fit only for some sort of protective environment. It is thus no accident that two of the many recurring images that haunt the book are those of two very contrasting fictional heroines: Scarlett O'Hara and Blanche Dubois, as played by Vivien Leigh in the movies of Gone with the Wind and Streetcar Named Desire.

The vital and always amusing Rachel Waring is a heroine to cherish and remember with delight. She shows us that old ladies are forever wonderful - some achievement indeed! Her creator is to be congratulated. As Carey says, he ought to have won the Booker.

Stephen Benatar, whose first two novels received wide acclaim and prize nominations but slow sales when they were published in the early 1980s, has been self-publishing and hand-selling his books in bookshops around London for thirty years. With the recent re-publication of this novel by the New York Review of Books, however, Benatar, now seventy-three, may finally be on the road to finding the audience he has worked so hard for. Wish Her Safe at Home, nominated for the Booker Prize in 1982, when it was first published, is a startling novel with an even more startling main character, Rachel Waring, a forty-seven-year-old woman who has a dead end job, a cynical roommate, and no friends. Brought up by an overbearing mother who seems to have ruined any chances Rachel might have had for a happy life, she is lonely and repressed, with no social skills. On one occasion on a train, she tries to open a conversation with a man reading in the seat across from her: "Do you mind if I talk to you for a moment? I've just read the most frightful description of a hanging, drawing, and quartering, and I'm afraid I can't stop reliving it."

Benatar wisely lets Rachel tell her own story, in which the reader identifies with Rachel because she is so pathetic and earnest about her needs, but at the same time the reader is aware of how far from "ordinary" she really is in her thinking. Every event here is filtered through Rachel's own mind, and when she becomes the sole beneficiary of an elderly aunt's Georgian home in Bristol, she decides to leave London for a new start. Once ensconced in the old house, which she refurbishes and refurnishes, she becomes a "new woman," buying a red dress, flirting with the vicar, revealing vivid sexual fantasies about the handsome young man who works in her garden, and spending lavishly from her savings.

It is not long before the reader realizes that Rachel is losing her grip, even as she is finding a kind of happiness that she has never known before. As she reminisces about her past and the man with whom she was desperately in love at age twenty-two, her behavior becomes more understandable, though no less bizarre. Her research on the original builder of the house, Horatio Gavin, an idealistic "champion of the underprivileged" and an associate of anti-slavery crusader William Wilberforce, becomes so intriguing to her that she decides to write a book about him, and soon she is imagining herself as "an eighteenth-century Rachel" who soothes the broken heart of Horatio, whose fiancée has died.

Throughout the novel, Rachel sings songs from the past--"If Love Were All," "Dancing in the Dark," "Oh, You Beautiful Doll," and many others--providing further entré into her psyche and her deterioration. As her voice becomes increasingly confidential and revelatory, the involved reader cannot help but recognize with alarm the growing contrast between Rachel as she sees herself and Rachel as she appears to the rest of the world. Benatar enhances this contrast by remaining firmly outside the action, never once intruding or explaining, thereby providing the drama and emotional connection which good fiction requires. The reader is inevitably drawn into Rachel's life, even as s/he sees its sad absurdities, its ironies, and its dark humor. Fascinating psychological novel and dark comedy. Mary Whipple

The introduction by John Carey needs a major Spoiler Alert. I might have wanted to discover the underlying truth of this book myself--so after realizing it was full of spoilers, I quit reading it and saved it for last. It makes a wonderful Reading Guide.

The plot description on the book jacket is a fair start. What you will discover slowly on your own, or quicker by reading the introduction, is that Rachel is an unreliable narrator straight out of Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O."--you realize she isn't accurately reflecting reality. What really makes this interesting is trying to figure out just how far off she is. Welty's short story makes reading between the lines easy. Here we are far more befuddled.

The best news is that we actually like Rachel, despite cringing on her behalf, and recognizing ourselves, perhaps, in equally cringe-worthy ways. Rachel has done and will do what she has to do to create a reality she can abide, which after all, is what we all do.

This book is a masterpiece, and don't miss Carey's Introduction--but I'd save it for last.

**This review may contain spoilers, however for this book, I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing...

Wish Her Safe at Home was a beautifully written story. The character of Rachel Waring was extremely complex and challenged me throughout the entire book. I am normally not a person who wants to know the plot before I read the book, but I felt that it may have assisted me with understanding the novel more fully, had I known just a bit more about where Rachel's character was headed. Immediately after finishing the book, I want to read it again, with a "if I knew then what I know now" perspective.

As the summary shows, Rachel Waring inherited a home from her great aunt. Having never lived on her own before Rachel saw the possibility of infinite adventures to be had from the inheritance. She spent all of her time creating her perfect home, and the friendship she made with the young boy who created her garden was one that lasted through the rest of the novel.

Rachel's character was interesting. I first thought that she was extremely eccentric, but came to learn (later than I wanted to) that she was slowly losing her mind. Her interactions with people around her were often humorous, however some of the conversations and scenes were frustrating and almost uncomfortable. I found myself confused during parts of the story. Rachel had a very active imagination and the book often walked through her imagined conversations with others. Near the end of the story, having always assumed that she wasn't really speaking out loud to the people she was with, I began to wonder whether she was in fact saying the things, instead of just keeping her thoughts to herself.

The development of her love for Horatio was also unique. She went from simply looking to learn more about his history related to her home, to purchasing a painting of him, to eventually thinking herself married to him and expecting his child. The slow evolution of this "relationship" brought Rachel from being just eccentric, to odd, and eventually to crazy.

The writing was beautiful and Stephan Benatar eloquently captured the mind and soul of Rachel. The book was set in the 1980's, however only minimal references gave away this time period - it could easily have been an early nineteenth century novel in both style and story. Though a truly unique and challenging read, I highly recommend the book to lovers of fiction.

For me, this is a very complicated book to write an opinion about. I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with this book. I found after reading the introduction that I forced myself not to truly engage in this book, out of fear that if I could relate to the character, this must be a sign that I am not stable. I felt sorry for Rachel. I was angry at her decision-making. I was hopeful that those around her were not really making fun of her. I started to think she was bringing it all onto herself. Overall, this book really kept me guessing. Rachel was so unpredictable, it was a page-turner just to see what she might do next.