As much as we may wish to whitewash our pasts, to scrub them of missteps and misdeeds, the truth is always with us. It lives on in our dreams and in those thoughtful silences that bring us face to face with our darkest desires, those times in which, because of pain or envy, we fell from grace to yearn for what we'd never admit to the world. We comfort ourselves with the notion that we are not those desires, that they are simply outbursts of frustration and anger, but this doesn't make them any easier to deal with, not in a mind that cannot hide from itself, not when it's so plain to us that we are largely responsible for our own terrible misfortunes. This is nearly as difficult a truth to express as to confess and yet Yvette Edwards does it with style in her engaging work of British fiction.
A mother with a job and a future, Jinx Jackson should have plenty to live for, but she is a woman haunted by her past. Fourteen years ago, when she was but sixteen, growing up in an islander-heavy part of London, she witnessed the murder of her mother, an event which caused her to emotionally distance herself from the world. Instead, she poured her energies into mortuary work, the systematic and artistic restoration of the dead that possesses the power to transform how the family views the fallen, replacing pain with peace, dismay with closure. But Jinx's days of hiding have come to an end. For not only has her marriage dissolved, not only is her emotional distance caused her to be an alien presence to her five-year-old son, an old friend has shown up on her doorstep for the first time since those terrible, bygone days, and he's disinclined to leave without revisiting old wounds that may well jar free truths Jinx would have rather stayed hidden.
A snapshot of immigrant London of the 1980s, A Cupboard Full of Coats is an enduring portrait of a life derailed by secrets and jealousies. Ms. Edwards, in cycling between the present day and the months surrounding the death of Jinx's mother, endows her protagonist with humanity and cruelty, empathy and viciousness, contrasting emotions that can only be simultaneously present in a spirit riven by conflict and guilt: at not doing more, at not being better. The author unfolds the mystery of the book's central death with mesmerizing deliberateness, methodically introducing us to Jinx's abusive stepfather who gradually succumbs to the white-hot rages only experienced by the acutely jealous. This tragic unraveling, as unstoppable as a freight train, artfully mirrors the disintegration of Jinx's life and mental health in the present where she has virtually alienated everyone who cares for her.
Knowing all of this, Jinx should be an exceedingly unlikeable character, an isolated depressive who drags us down into her well of loneliness, and yet this is not at all the case. In showing us who she used to be, and in giving us a glimpse of who she wishes to be, Ms. Edwards succeeds in attaching our sympathies to Jinx which makes the book's potent conclusion all the more affecting. Moreover, the emotional and psychological harm we see befall Jinx transforms her into a creature for whom we can safely root, or can we?
This is a lush novel, full of rich foods, colorful stories, engaging accents and dark deeds which is remarkably enjoyable for the grimness of its subject matter. A significant achievement for a work of quiet, period fiction. (4/5 Stars)<(
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