Bernard and the Cloth Monkey Book

Judith Bryan's first novel, Bernard and the Cloth Monkey won the 1997 Saga Prize, an award for unpublished black novelists born in Britain or the Republic of Ireland.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 clichés 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 OrmondRead More