Bernardine Bishop (1939–2013)

“She felt a passionate, tearful longing for ordinariness, for the ordinariness of so many past days she had taken for granted, and not thought to rejoice over.” (p. 185)

Cecilia Banks, a psychotherapist in her late sixties has been forced into retirement by complex colon cancer, requiring a colostomy and “a reinvented backside”. She is still healing from surgery and radiation, when her son, Ian Forest, a foreign correspondent, presents her with his child, the product of his two-week stand with a beautiful, schizophrenic young woman, Leda. Leda has left the infant on Ian’s doorstep, and, he, with his peripatetic existence, not knowing what to do, and apparently used to taking his mother for granted leaves the child (bizarrely named Cephas—Aramaic for “Simon”) in Cecilia’s care. Her quiet, comfortable existence with Tim, her tolerant second husband, a retired academic, is about to change.

Cecilia falls in love with the Cephas and is seemingly prepared to raise him. However, she is realistic enough to know that her age and the potential return of the cancer are problems. Meanwhile, Ian has arranged for a paternity test and has come to the conclusion that he loves his long-time, slightly younger co-worker, Marina, also a TV journalist who travels to the hotspots of the world. Marina has plans for Ian, Cephas and herself: they will become a family. Things do not go exactly as planned, of course. For one thing, Leda returns, now going by the bizarre new name of “Volumnia”. Will she want to take Cephas back? Surely she cannot, after having abandoned him.

A second narrative strand concerns Helen, Cecilia’s “colostomy friend”, a voluble, dramatic, and fairly celebrated novelist, who is also in her sixties. Helen gave up a child many years back. She has recently learned that the young woman, now a successful accountant, has been making inquiries about her birth mother, but does not want to meet her. Self-centred but honest, Helen is attempting rapprochement with her own, fragile elderly mother, as well as making efforts to adjust to the changes in her love life that cancer and a colostomy have effected.

Bernardine Bishop’s novel sounds like a soap opera, but she writes gently, sensitively, forgivingly, and occasionally humorously about her characters’ foibles--and, in doing so, lifts it above one. The tender, quiet writing makes readers rather more accepting of those characters than they might otherwise be, as well as more willing to credit the rather odd life circumstances they find themselves in. To ground her work in reality, Bishop writes frankly about some of the messier aspects of cancer that are seldom addressed in novels. She also provides many realistic domestic details about babies and young children—their teething, crying jags, and clinging.

Knowing that the author died not long after the publication of this novel and acknowledging the solidness of the writing in the book, I wish I could say that I enjoyed it. I certainly believed in the characters and the situations they faced, but I felt that the book (approaching 400 pages) was simply too long. I think it could’ve been whittled back by a quarter or even a third. I can understand the praise that some have heaped upon it. I certainly appreciate some of the reflections on life in general and life-altering illness in particular. However, the details about child care quickly became tedious and monotonous. At times, I found the narrative rather plodding.

Unexpected Lessons in Love may appeal to those who like gentle, domestic fiction with just a pinch of quirkiness.… (mehr)