Ninepins by Rosy Thornton

Regular readers of this blog will know how I have watched Rosy's writing career. Not for her the 'quick fix': instead it's been a hard-working journey towards excellence. I reviewed her previous novel The Tapestry of Love  here two years ago (Gosh!  it seems only like yesterday.)

And now we have Ninepins, a mature and impressive novel about motherhood, isolation and anxiety. Set against the brooding and unforgiving landscape of the fens with its huge skies, dykes, rivers and marshes, it mirrors Laura's anxiety that danger is lurking around the corner and if she's not careful to control it it will all unravel. A single mother, Laura lives with her daughter Beth who has just begun secondary school and is struggling to cope with all thc changes it brings. She is a child one minute and a stroppy pre-teenager the next. In order to increase her income Laura takes in lodgers, usually students, in her the converted pump-house adjacent to her home, Ninepins. Against her better judgement, she agrees to take in Willow, a seventeen-year-pld just out of local authority care. When Laura finds out she was taken into care for arson she fears she has brought danger into her household.

Danger is never far away in this elemental landscape. This is a novel of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. As Beth falls into bad company, Laura is drawn to Willow's life and learns of her relationship with her own mother. Tension mounts as we wonder whether Willow is all that she seems. Can she be trusted or is she more trustworthy than anxious, over-controlling and tense Laura? Is Laura a good mother doing the best she? Or is she over-controlling and worrying unnecessarily?

This is a novel full of layers, not least of all a slow-building relationship with social worker, Vince which I hope will work out for them both. (Hark at me, the old romantic!)

Rosy has kindly agreed to talk about one of them and how her own experience has informed this rich and rewarding novel.

So, over to Rosy.

"Most parenting, it seems to me, is fraught with a central tension between attachment and independence: between the protective parental rôle of caregiver and the need to learn to let go. Our kids, I always think, are joined to us not by chains or unyielding apron strings but by elastic. At the beginning, the elastic is coiled close, unstretched and untested, but later, at each new stage, it starts to feel the pull.

The child ventures gradually further and further away, but each time the elastic holds good, and shortens again as she comes back. The first time she toddles away from you across the room without your supporting arms, the first day you leave her at school or nursery, the first sleepover or overnight school trip, the first date: both sides learn to trust the elastic not to snap – to be sure of its gentle tug even when you are apart, not obtrusively, but there when you feel for it, a constant safety line.

But what of a child who is fostered or adopted? How does it work then? How does parent or child dare to let the elastic stretch when they are not yet sure that it is secured at either end? Then, the task is more about the forming of ties, the slow building of attachments with a child whose early experience of separation and loss may make attaching hard for her – a task made all the more difficult if at the same time your child is needing to explore and test her independence. 

Nine years ago, my partner and I adopted two girls, both of school age, who had spent the early years of their lives in the local authority care system. We are still trying our best to be parents to our daughters, although at the moment – very sadly and for different reasons – neither of them is able still to be living with us. Ninepins is absolutely not a book about our family, but many of the questions, fears and challenges of parenting find expression in its pages. 

Like most parents, Laura – the mother in the novel – is constantly feeling her way with Beth, her daughter: needing to find means of expressing her love, of putting it into practice, which won’t spark a rejection or smother her child. That’s one of the biggest challenges, isn’t it? The conflict between your own feelings, which are so all-consuming, and the attempt to give your child, at every fresh step, the independence and self-reliance she needs.

With an adopted child, of course, the difficulty is all the more pointed: no child of six or seven wants a complete stranger to seize fierce hold of her, physically and emotionally, on day one the way a birth mother enfolds her newborn. Both parent and child are feeling their way more tentatively towards a sense of belonging. I explore that tentativity perhaps most obviously in the novel through the slow-growing attachment between Laura and Willow, her teenage lodger and herself a survivor of the care system.

Natural or adoptive, it makes no difference: our kids are a constant source of anxiety. We worry about them, and about their futures, whether they are with us or apart. And that is, perhaps, the key theme of Ninepins, which gives it its central tension. We are never quite sure, until the book’s end, whether Laura’s fears for Beth are real or imagined: whether the dangers she perceives are real, or only the conjurings of an over-protective mother."
_________________________________________________

Back to me. I thought I'd wrap up this post with one of the many beautiful descriptions of the natural environment that are threaded throughout this accomplished novel.


It was a movement now, that caught her attention: a sudden streak, low over the winter wheat, that was gone before she truly saw it. It was no more than a tick, a dash. Could movement have a colour? If so, she sensed that its shade was dark - thought the field itself was dark, too, black soil between the green shoots, so there was nothing to differentiate what she saw but the simple fact of motion. She knew at once what she had seen. That dizzy speed, that plunging arc, had been missing from the landscape since last summer's end. It was the swallows back again; it was the spring.