I suppose in the light of an article I’ve just read about the dangers of not mentioning whether a book was bought or given for free I should ‘fess up straight away here and say that Prince Rupert’s Teardrop was not only given to me for free, but given to me by the author herself. Lisa Glass is one of the lovely book foxes to be found writing at the always-fabulous book blog Vulpes Libris, and she contacted me a few months ago to ask whether I might like to review her debut novel on Other Stories. Of course I accepted with glee, but it’s taken me forever to get around to reading it thanks to the MA.

But read it I finally have, and boy, it was worth the wait. I promise you I’m not just saying this because I know that Lisa will be reading this, but Prince Rupert’s Teardrop is a seriously impressive novel, let alone debut novel. I’ve just been reading what some other bloggers had to say about the book (DGR, Vulpes Libris, Lizzy, Simon) and I think that DGR summed it up best when she said that it ‘punches above its weight’.

The story is told largely from the point of view of Mary Sibley, a woman in her 50s who lives with her 94-year-old  mother – Meghranoush – in Plymouth. Meghranoush is a survivor of the Armenian genocide, as we find out in uncomfortable detail in chapter four, where she describes just some of the absolute horror of the genocide (graphic description warning):

Next to me in haystack was pregnant lady, she hold my hand and smile and tell me things be okay. I hear men coming for my field, they got fire sticks, and again I run. She too fat to run, she sweating, tired, so she stay. They find her, I watch from barn, they throw her down, one spread her legs and shoot bullets up. I hear the screams now, loud in my ears. (p. 44)

One day, though, Meghranoush disappears while Mary is out walking. When she doesn’t return home by the next morning, Mary is panicking about what to do – and here is where we start to realise Mary’s predicament, which has only been hinted towards before now. If I were to come home and find my elderly mother missing, then I would phone the police. I imagine that would be the first reaction of many people. But Mary doesn’t feel that she can, because she we find out she has a history of phoning the police with trivial matters. Gradually, as more details emerge, we realise that Mary is quite seriously mentally ill, possibly with schizophrenia (she doesn’t like the television being on for fear of malign forces being unleashed into the house). This might make her the most unreliable of unreliable narrators – what is real, and what isn’t? – but as the back cover blurb says:

…what has happened is not just inside her head. A trail of glass birds mocks her. A silver thimble shines on the riverbed – a thimble that belonged to her mother. A glassblower burns a body in a furnace and uses the ash to colour a vase. Rumours circulate of a monster stalking the women of Plymouth. A serial killer who specialises in the elderly.

So is Meghranoush a victim of this killer, or are the clues and parallels Mary identifies as she tries to find her mother without anyone’s help merely the tricks of her unreliable mind? Has Meghranoush really only abandoned the daughter she finds so hard to deal with? That is open to interpretation, and I’ll say no more so as not to influence anyone else’s reading.

Lisa Glass’s writing is really superb – R.N. Morris says she has ‘dazzling linguistic exuberance’ and I couldn’t put it better myself. At first I felt that some of her specific word choices were, well, bizarre (thank god for the dictionary), but the more I read, the more I thought that the words fitted with Mary’s sometimes skewed thought processes. While Mary is undoubtedly mentally ill, she is far from stupid, and I found it appropriate that she inwardly describes people and situations in her own perceptive but slightly jarring way. The tone of the novel was completely spot on in my view, and the discomfort that comes from reading about Mary behaving ’strangely’ in public really made me question my own reactions to ‘odd’ behaviour. To see the stares and hear the giggles from Mary’s point of view while all the time knowing Mary’s reasons for her behaviour – even if they are ultimately only in her own head – was an enlightening and I must say chastening reading experience. Lisa Glass has written Mary with real sympathy towards her condition, even when that condition – at first anyway – makes it difficult for readers to sympathise directly with the character.

Still, as you will no doubt realise from the chapter four passage I quoted above, this is sometimes a very uncomfortable novel to read, and certainly not one to pick up if you are faint of heart. I am pretty much fine with literary gore (film gore is another matter, bleurgh) but the matter-of-fact descriptions of murder and genocide made me flinch on a few occasions. That is testament to Lisa Glass, though. She resists the temptation to over-emotionalise subjects that it would be very easy to drown in pathos. Instead, she lets the horror of the situation speak for itself. My only criticism, however, comes from the inclusion of a scene early in the novel. Our serial killer – from whose point of view the novel comes for a few of the chapters – remembers a graphic scene where he is violently raped as a teenager, and this, the implication is, forms part of the reason that he is so disturbed in later life. However, later in the book there is a more convincing or perhaps obvious reason for his damaged state, which seems to be a much better ‘fit’ in the novel. I agree with Lizzy, then, that the rape scene is on balance slightly surplus to requirements.

This niggle aside, Prince Rupert’s Teardrop is a very accomplished novel that has the gripping narrative of a crime thriller, but more much literary depth. It also makes for an eye-opening treatise on who is ’sane’ and who is ‘insane’. I believe there is a second novel by Lisa Glass somewhere in the pipeline, and I for one am already looking forward to it.

Prince Rupert’s Teardrop by Lisa Glass | Two Ravens Press | £9.99 paperback