Cape Town - Meredith Maggs lives in her home, her sanctuary, and she hasn’t left it for 1 214 days.
She can’t leave her house because of a terrible act of sexual violence and betrayal.
But it’s her carefully curated space of safety. She has people who care about her and are let in, but very few.
Her work as a remote editor and writer, and this quote at the start of the book, well-chosen, and from Meredith’s favourite poet, Emily Dickinson, sets the tone in many ways for what will happen in the novel): “I fear me this – is Loneliness – /The Maker of the soul/Its Caverns and its Corridors/Iluminate – or seal.’’
Meredith is not a hermit. She has an old school friend Sadie who comes around regularly, she’s friendly with the online food delivery person, and through a chatroom where nobody knows each other’s real names, she “talks” to people.
One of them, Celeste, becomes a friend. She isn’t shut-in, but she has been sexually assaulted.
Meredith and her sister Fee have had a terrible childhood, raised by a dysfunctional mother, seldom there.
Meredith has cut them both out of her life.
But then things start shifting. Meredith meets Tom, whose work it is to befriend people who can’t leave their homes or have other problems. She also has an online therapist.
She just can’t walk down the garden path anymore.
Meredith alone raises issues of sexual violence against women and does so in a competent way.
One of the important things she makes very clear is that you can be raped without violence, you can feel so guilty you don’t tell anyone, or go to the police, and often those closest to you won’t believe you.
It also deals with the fear of having one’s curated safe life disturbed.
Meredith is terrified that someone from social work will flag her as not being capable to run her life, and the fact is that apart from the sadness of a youngish clever women trapped behind her front door, she looks after herself, loves her cat, Fred, and her small circle, but is starting to feel that maybe she needs to walk to her front gate, which is only five steps.
I really enjoyed this book. The characters are real. The fearful part of the book is how close we all are to not being able to go on, and the suggestion that there may be many people wounded but who are still managing to walk and maintain seemingly normal lives.
A crisis will pull Meredith and Fee back together, with complications that involve the very hard work of forgiveness and resolving past pain and abuse.
If one thing bothered me a little about this fine first novel, it is that some of the changes seemed to move too fast and I really wanted to know more of the back story of how the family was destroyed by their mother.
Perhaps a prequel might be written. This book is well written and engaging.
Meredith Alone by Claire Alexander is available at www.loot.co.za.
Cape Times