Bernard and the Cloth Monkey - Softcover

Bryan, Judith

3.69

181 ratings by Goodreads

9780002257350: Bernard and the Cloth Monkey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0002257351 ISBN 13: 9780002257350

Publisher: Flamingo, 1998

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The Winner of the Saga Prize.

You can always go home again. But sometimes, for some people, it’s the hardest thing of all to do. Anita is one of these people. But after all this time, with her dad dead, she might just be ready now, ready to face her ghosts...

This stirring, unsettling book has it all – incest, suicide, wife-beating, lesbianism, an imaginary twin, sibling rivalry, the works.

Full-on drama

An unforgettable heroine in Anita

Psychological subtlety

Tackles black British taboos – the sanctity of the Mother; the ambitions & secrets of the black middle class.

A great new black British writer in Judith Bryan

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Review:

Judith Bryan's first novel, Bernard and the Cloth Monkey won the 1997 Saga Prize, an award for unpublished black novelists born in Britain or the Republic of Ireland. The occasional narrative clich�s apart, this is a cleverly-constructed, complex and harrowing account of the psychological trauma brought about by terrible family secrets. When 22-year-old student Anita Moore returns to her "homestead" in the suburbs of London after a three year absence, and three months after the death of her father, Bernard, she embarks on a journey that will force her to confront the past. Her younger sister Beth is housesitting while their mother is away on a cruise in the Caribbean, and Anita finds startling changes both to her sister and to the house, behind which the shadow of her authoritarian father still lurks. Flashbacks to episodes in the siblings' childhood insidiously reveal the reasons for her revulsion and fear, and for Beth's obsessive housework--a means of escaping anguish. As Anita comes to terms with the nervous breakdown which made her leave home, Beth's facade begins to break up and she too recalls the violence of her father and the collusion of her mother--the passive "cloth monkey" to which the two girls hopelessly clung like laboratory monkeys. Bryan explores two linked and damaged psyches in poetic and often dream-like prose. --Emily Ormond

From the Back Cover:

You can always go home again, but sometimes, for some people, it's the hardest thing of all to do. Anita – Nita, An, whoever – is one of these people. But after all this time, she might just be ready now, ready to face her ghosts...

But she can't rush. When your hard, stoney dreams keep you awake, and it takes treatments and therapies and pills to keep you asleep, and the reasons lie there, back at that house, it's just not easy to face up to your history – especially on the battlefield where it all took place. However, when Nita gets home, she finds a house without its horror, with just her elder sister Beth keeping it together, as dutiful and reliable as ever. But when childhood friends and old lovers bring memories back as gifts for the prodigal daughter, the mood changes, the conversation gets heated and the family secrets boil over...

In this stirring and unsettling book, winner of this year's Saga Prize for the best new black British writer, Judith Bryan has created an unforgettable heroine in Anita – unflinchingly she takes her reader to the centre of Anita's trauma and leaves them with the journey marked indelibly on their heart.

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