The Eyrie by Stevie Davies

I finished The Eyrie (written by my MA tutor, Stevie Davies) just over a week ago and every day since I’ve woken up and thought ‘I’ll write a review of that today,’ but I haven’t. How does this crime-writer get a hook on a novel in which there are no murders, no torture and nothing in terms of melodrama? I wondered. Well, this quiet but compelling book insisted I give it some serious thought and I’ve found it difficult to stop thinking about it. The Eyrie has ‘potentially prize-winning novel’ written all over it, and indeed Stevie Davies’s previous novel was long-listed for the Orange Prize for fiction. And yet somehow Stevie Davies is not the least bit famous. As A.L. Kennedy puts it in her Guardian review of The Eyrie, ‘Stevie Davies, as far as I know, has never even attempted to take part in The X Factor. She does not work as a plant stylist or a lifestyle coach for pet manicurists and has not spent exhaustively televised hours having plastic surgery, abusing other races or being taught to samba indifferently.’

Stevie Davies then, doesn’t have what people in the know refer to as ‘platform’ but what she does have is a rare gift for taking what is ordinary and making it utterly interesting, funny and meaningful. Literary fiction with the common touch? - you might scoff. But yes, that is exactly what this is.

The Eyrie is a country mansion-cum-block of flats, situated near Swansea, and The Eyrie is the tale of three women who live within it: ‘Red Dora’, Eirlys and Hannah. Each of them is hiding from something it seems: Dora, a Scottish nonagenarian, from the groupies and students interested in her Communist past; Eirlys, in middle-age is getting some peace away from her noisy extended family, and Hannah, twenty-six, has left her husband and abandoned her step-daughters to move to Wales in the hope of finding her father. Dora is jolted by the appearance of Hannah, as she is the image of Dora’s own daughter, Rosa, who died suddenly in prison many years before. An intense relationship builds between the three women and the plot is woven around their various victories and tribulations.

War is an ever-present theme. The Spanish Civil War, in which Dora lost her young husband, Lachlan, is almost a character in itself. As are the other battles in which Dora has both participated and railed against. Lachlan, who died seventy years ago, had been ‘a hopeless fighter.’ We are told of Dora that ‘At first she had not recognised her husband. His face had been shot away. Nancy had to say, Dora, dear, I think it’s Lachlan. Don’t panic.’

During the Spanish Civil War Dora had apparently ‘helped with the care of our boys, their boys: Republican or Fascist casualties were all just boys,’ and all these years later ‘she still remembered the beautiful torsos of tanned boy-amputees.’

And then we have Eirlys who says ‘An egg always slipped down lovely,’ and ‘sheer sensuality was breakfast.’ We hear that her father had said ‘we should enjoy our food, having thanked the Giver,’ and that ‘As a small girl, Eirlys had thought he must mean Mam. Who else?’

But Eirlys is not simply a food-loving Welsh matriarch. She has no children of her own (although she is frequently called upon to mother her nieces and nephews), and in her time she has been an activist too. Indeed she was imprisoned for her Welsh nationalist protests.

The book is populated by oddball Welsh characters, including the funeral parlour’s Mr Presdee, who is known as ‘Presdee the Death’ and the chippy’s ‘Joe Davies the Chip’, amongst others. Then there is Eirlys’s cousin, Waldo, who is a Welsh poet. ‘Not many poets, he said, had attempted the haiku in Welsh.’ (I thought instantly of Nigel Jenkins). ‘But when a series of haikus had struck him like frisbees, what could a poor hack do but put up his hand to receive them?’

The Eyrie is a novel to savour. I found the pace of my reading slowed as I went on, since I was reluctant to miss a word. But it’s not a novel in which everything is beautiful and light. There is darkness here too. We are shown the ignorant and unkind - and lord, they make you want to throttle them - but for me the novel is ultimately hopeful. Dora’s library, brimming with great works of fiction, politics and philosophy is at the heart The Eyrie – both Hannah and Eirlys are drawn to it - and Dora’s ideas of education and self-improvement seem to hold within them the promise of better things to come. I would read this book solely for Red Dora - a cooler creature at age 92 than all of her family and friends put together.

The Eyrie, Stevie Davies. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £12.99. 240 pages.