Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A mysterious novel of lyrical beauty, 9 Oct 2001
On a sunny, cloudless day, with marshlands stretching to an endless blue horizon, there is nowhere in the world more beautiful than Norfolk. But make that a heavy, grey sky over mud flats and you have an entirely different, oppressive landscape. Jacqui Lofthouse is good at weather. And she evokes, sometimes lyrically, a brooding landscape that echoes the state of mind of her suicidal female writer, Alison Bliss.
Bliss, daughter of a poetess and ex-model, is, or rather was, a novelist. It is through her writing notebooks and her husband's narration, as he retraces her steps to the Norfolk coast, that we begin to unravel the mystery at the heart of Jacqui Lofthouse's novel: why, having survived anorexia and the unwanted attention of a voracious press, and with her writing going well at last, did Alison Bliss decide to walk to her death into the North Sea?
Bluethroat Morning is about suicide. It is about loss, about beauty and fame, and the space between people. And it returns again and again to the feelings of inadequacy and unhappiness that ripple out into adulthood from an unsatisfactory parent-child relationship. .
Lofthouse's characters really live. They are vividly portrayed and unexpected things happen to them. Particularly wonderful is the manipulative, ninety-eight year old Ern Higham who spins his yarns to the suicidal novelist in his isolated cottage encrusted with the relics of his past. Then there is the narrator of the book, Harry Bliss, breaking out of years of mourning and celibacy, in an act of desperate coupling with his best friend's 19-year old daughter in a Norfolk graveyard.
Bluethroat Morning can be read as an accomplished and gripping gothic mystery, as the story of Harry Bliss's journey out of the halfway house of his grief and incomprehension, and also as an exploration of one woman's relationship to beauty, fame, love and death. Most memorably, however, Bluethroat Morning is a novel about writing a novel. As we watch Alison Bliss struggle to put form to the ghosts that haunt her, Lofthouse creates a convincing and poignant picture of what it means to write: the deep-seated need to create; to produce something of lasting value; to be true to oneself; to validate oneself; to understand, or at least come to terms with, one's world through literature. Alison Bliss uses her pen as an explorative, escapist and destructive tool. Ironically, it is only through solving her creative problems that Alison Bliss finally loses the plot.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very good book, 15 Oct 2001
By A Customer
I found this a wonderfully well-written, taut, sensual and moving novel. The characters and settings are unfolded before the reader, warts and all; but with a desolate and compelling beauty. Despite the bleak subject matter - anorexia, suicide, loss - the language in which it is written makes it not a depressing read, just thought-provoking and tantalising. It stayed with me long after I had finished it.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Norfolk twin-tale of obsession, 10 Oct 2001
By A Customer
In this novel, Jacqui Lofthouse takes us through love, obsession, self-doubt and discovery in two parallel stories interwoven by blood and spearated by a generation. I was drawn ever more deeply into a world of harsh landscapes and longstanding secrets. She skillfully combines nostalgia, romance, death and sex with a powerful combination of subtlelty and shock. I particularly enjoyed the vivid descriptions of the passionate first encounter of the central characters and then old man's lost world against the backdrop of a salty aired Norfolk shore. Read this book to escape from city life to open coastlines and wide horizons.
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