Review of Keeping Mum

So far, so conventional. What makes it unusual is that it is a collective novel written by an eclectic group of 15 authors. They met through The Dark Angels, an organisation running residential creative writing courses drawing on literary techniques for people in the business world, the most recent having been held in Merton College, Oxford. The idea for this collaborative project, first mooted for writers at Oxford’s Story Museum, resulted in this story.

The group gathered in Balavil, a remote country house in the Scottish Highlands which turned out to be an inspiration in itself. Also inspired by William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, they decided to write a novel from the first-person viewpoint of each of the 15 characters: the dead woman herself (her story is printed white on black paper), her lover, her husband, her three squabbling children, the local undertaker, the GP and others.

No one character was to take precedence, each needed to consider his or her relationship to the dead woman and to each other, each needed to be clear when to enter and exit so enabling the plot to develop smoothly.

The first idea was to write the story in relay, one character handing on the chapter to the next, but they soon realised a clear structure was imperative: the narrative would follow a journey from Oxford to London that would gradually reveal the hidden life of the dead woman: the family would take the corpse from Balmore to London in a white van, stopping at the favourite places she had visited unbeknown to them.

Did it work? It certainly plays with the unreliability of memory, with lies and self deception.

Some characters were more believable than others. Stella, Iris’s friend, an Oxford poet, calls her “a flower. Bright and perfumed, easy to fall for, full of secrets”.

The need to refer back to the identity of each character proved a distraction; what helped was the characters’ growing understanding of themselves and each other in this blackly comic and at times touching tale.