‘Shaped by Memory’ – by Paul Westmoreland
This is the fourth published novel by Paul Westmoreland and, like its predecessors, is an absorbing and intriguing tale with a compelling narrative.
The author is a gifted storyteller and the reader finds himself drawn into the comings and goings (literally so in many places) of the characters and wanting to see how they each ‘turn out’.
Once more, as with his previous books, we are presented with a complicated family tree and characters whose relationships, successful or otherwise, form the bedrock of the story.
The title of the novel immediately made me think of Marcel Proust’s great work “À la Recherce du Temps Perdu’, In Search of Lost Time’, although I confess that I have never read it! I did read a review of the work, when it was recently republished, in which the following quote surfaced: ‘desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade”. The reviewer, Claudia Merrill, suggests that Proust ‘does not want us to despair of how our life is but rather to feel appreciation for what we have.’ and I thought this could certainly apply to the principal character in ‘Shaped by Memory’ – Guy Tynan.
The action of the novel alternates largely between England and Canada.
We first meet Guy as he returns to England ‘at the end of the first decade of the new century’ from Canada. Much of the book follows Guy in his travels between his Great Uncle Eddie’s home in Edmonton, his parents, Graham and Amy’s home and his Aunt Anna and his cousin Melissa’s house in Yorkshire. Guy also visits his sister Susie’s home in Wilmslow, near Manchester where she lives with her husband, Gavin, and he spends a year in America completing part of his American Studies course begun at Manchester University.
As he has done in his previous books, the author makes effective use of switching between the characters’ present-day lives and their reminiscences of times past. There is a helpful ‘dramatis personae’ at the front of the book to aid the reader in keeping track of the various ‘cast members’ and we get to learn of the events they become involved in by means of individual chapters written from a particular character’s viewpoint.
In earlier chapters, we are introduced not only to different generations of the Tynan family but also to their friends the Hursts and, in particular, to Julia Hurst, whose relationship with Guy is the underlying thread that binds the plot of the novel together. We also meet school friends of Guy and Julia and we are treated to a very realistic evocation of what it is like to be a teenager with the inevitable conflicting emotions caused by physical attraction to the opposite sex.
Both principal families – the Tynans and the Hursts, have made up their minds that Guy and Julia, childhood sweethearts, belong with each other despite their leading very different lives and being separated from each other for long periods at a time.
However, Guy’s relationship with Julia Hurst is devastatingly affected by two events – his cousin Melissa’s seduction of him one Easter and his witnessing, in Hareton Woods, Julia’s seduction (albeit not entirely willingly on her part) by Stuart Fox, who was briefly at school with Guy and Julia and who comes to Julia’s rescue when she is menacingly threatened in the park by another school acquaintance of theirs – Nigel Bendon.
Guy cannot come to terms with what happened between himself and Melissa nor can he blot out of his memory what he saw in the woods. He uses his sojourns in Canada to distance himself from, and to try and forget, the events he has witnessed in England and, in so doing, we are introduced to the third person to become involved in Guy’s life - Nicola Stainer.
Guy first meets Nicola Stainer when he stops off at Bob Linus’ motel on his way to visit Edmond Tynan’s sister, Tess in Vancouver. Bob Linus, an old friend of Edmond’s, asks Guy to return an overcoat belonging to Drew Stainer, Nicola’s grandfather, which the latter had left when visiting Bob. This overcoat or, more accurately, what is left in one of the pockets provides another sub plot in the novel which involves the Stainers -present and past generations- and, in particular, Nicola and Guy..
From the very first moment Guy sees Nicola ‘running very quickly (towards him) with a mass of blond hair flowing behind’ he is attracted to her and during the five years that follow this initial meeting, he returns on several occasions with a view to continuing their burgeoning relationship.
He has to make sense of a story that ‘shaped my adventures in Canada… shaping my life..’
‘Why is it, he asks, we don’t remember life in its given order with just one clear, straight road?’
It is Nicola who eventually challenges Guy about whether what he witnessed in Hareton Woods was real or imagined, ‘perhaps you didn’t see it; perhaps your fears drew you into seeing what was not there.’
The foregoing summary can only hint, (and feebly at that), at the many fascinating twists and turns of the story into which the reader is inexorably drawn.
Finally, to return (momentarily) to Proust: Guy Tynan might, in another time and place, have found an echo of his own experiences in the words of the narrator of `À La Recherche du Temps Perdu’ ‘my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me… things, places, years.’
‘Shaped by Memory’ is, essentially, a love story- the ups and downs of which are vividly and unforgettably charted by Paul Westmoreland in a novel that lingers in the memory and is possibly the best, so far, of his published works.
Nick Lloyd viii.i.mmxxiv