Recommend: Yes<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I would class Study for Obedience<\/em> as \u2018modern gothic\u2019. The small novel is set in a rugged \u2018Northern\u2019 country that I wasn\u2019t able to identify. It\u2019s a tale of the intensely domestic situated within an elaborate, isolated manor that overlooks a cold and unfamiliar township.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was the house, standing at the end of a long dirt track and in a stand of trees, on a hill above a small, sparsely inhabited town. A creek marked the property boundary to one side, and at night the sound of its fretful flow came through my bedroom window. Looking down the drive, one could see dense forest, a small town deep in the valley, and beyond, the mountains, higher than any I had seen before.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Any reader of gothic fiction will know that, whether it\u2019s the 1800s or the 2000s, the best gothic tales stitch their taut plots together with the tension of repression. Bram Stoker\u2019s Dracula<\/em> confronted the Victorians with the perversity of their sexual repression. The repression throbbing throughout Study for Obedience<\/em> is not of an explicitly sexual nature but instead investigates the repression that is associated with submission.\u00a0 I thought back often to another ‘modern gothic’ novel by another Sarah: Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall.<\/em> Both novels reduce the complex modern technological world back into the bare bones of barbaric human tendencies, as if to say the past, both recent and very distant, sits with you even as you type on your smartphone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this diorama, we track claustrophobic family dynamics, tainted by an unnatural closeness. These souring relations seem to seep into and poison the external society of this unnamed \u2018Northern\u2019 county \u2013 placid dogs howl violently three times a day in unison; the town\u2019s sow crushes her newborn piglets; cows madden and injure their owners. And all the while, as the present falls victim to malaise, the past lurks unended. There is the implication that the events unfolding now have been made inevitable by the transgressions of the past. There is the constant thrumming of an unspoken generation trauma, implied a few times to belong to the Jewish diaspora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While the phrasing of the title \u2018Study for Obedience\u2019<\/em> feels jarring, it is no accident of wording. The narrator has devoted her whole life to obedience. We see it playing out in this \u2018Northern\u2019 country, which she has visited at the request of her brother. Her brother, recently divorced and lonesome, seeks a housekeeper, and invites his sister (our narrator). There\u2019s little warmth in their relationship. She is primarily an employee, not a sister. There is intimacy yet it is quietly hostile, akin to a doctor closely monitoring a patient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are glimpses that this \u2018study for obedience\u2019 constrains the narrator\u2019s entire life. She is formally employed as a typist at a legal firm to transcribe their lawyer\u2019s recorded utterances. In her official work there is only strict adherence to the whims of others. And then, always, the vague notion that she is to submit to her ethnic history, a suggestion that her lineage cheated fate by surviving and that she will not be so lucky \u2013 that she shall have to obey the charts of the stars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although I feel that Study for Obedience<\/em> is a gothic text, I stress that it is a modern one. Bernstein\u2019s prose has none of the rigid, old fashioned style of Stoker or Mary Shelley. There\u2019s no stilted dialogue and no tiresome repetition of scenes. There\u2019s not even a single letter embroidering the pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bernstein\u2019s lean more to the poetics of a sentence, using sound rather than details to create ambience. It is very common for a sentence to be segmented time and time over by commas. Take this exchange where the narrator\u2019s brother is persuading her to join him in this \u2018Northern\u2019 country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I did not respond immediately, he assured me that the house, although storied and ancient, although once belonging to the distinguished leaders of the historic crusade against our forebears, nevertheless had all the modern conveniences. These, he enumerated, as though he were the agent of some new, dubious hotel: high-speed internet, a variety of on-demand streaming services, a soaking tub, a rainfall shower, a memory form mattress, hand-woven linens, a convection oven, and so on and so forth. As my brother\u2019s claims about the furnishings of his home proceeded by this logic of declension, it occurred to me as it had perhaps occurred to him that he knew very little about me and, what\u2019s more, that this concerned him. For instance, as he said the word \u2018mattress\u2019, his voice became suddenly panicked, as if he feared he had made the most irremediable blunder, that this mention of the mattress would be unacceptable, perhaps even offensive, to me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n This paragraph actually has an entire page both proceeding and following it. The paragraphs are so long and there are so many commas that lull you into its flow, it feels like the reader and the narrator are very close, erring on comfortably so. It takes a long time to move from one scene to the next. It feels like you are seeing all around you, taking everything in all at once. This, of course, cannot be, and the notion of the unreliable narrator pokes it\u2019s head towards the end of the novel. And from the outset we, like the townspeople, are weary of someone who acts only in service of select others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This writing style is clearly not traditionally gothic. Yet we feel the heavy weight of the inevitable unveiling of human nature from the very first page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The narrator is constantly challenging where a story begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A beginning a beginning again.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Better perhaps to begin again.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n But here I find myself wandering again, into the past, which after all is not an explanation for anything, the lines of flight being so various, the question of harm and its reproduction so unanswerable, the beginnings always beginning again.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Here, I feel Bernstein exploring, yes, how a story is composed but also more abstractedly how it is for one generation to begin, having always been birthed from the one closer to expiry. She is forcing us to consider the extent we do, and should, study and obey that prescribed lineage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the intervening years, as I scrolled or clicked through these photographs, I often wondered which of us could be said to be more perverse: my schoolmates, every last one of whom, it appeared, had turned away from the world, retired to their enclaves, chosen the lives of their parents; or I, who had been plagued since childhood with the feeling that I needed to scrub myself clean, that all that was needed to be free was to physically remove myself from the company of people who comprised the community in which I had grown up, as though life were easy, or even possible.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Narratively, the prioritisation of poetic prose means that Study for Obedience<\/em> can have a real issue with visibility and consistency. Mostly I felt I knew what was happening and what the themes were, although this was only after a taxing amount of focus on my part. But towards the end the narrator\u2019s voice gets jumpy and I did lose track of her motivations. This was frustrating, having been at such close proximity to her for the entire proceeding chapters of the novel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My discontent regarding the ending is compounded by the difficulty I had seeing the plot throughout the entire novel. Everything is blurry, as though a mist has settled around the past, present and future. Bernstein withholds the Who What When Where. We simply have to feel our way around the story, doing what we can despite our senses dulled by that mist. We don’t know what country we are in. We don’t know what specific ethnic trauma the narrator is parsing, just that it is Jewish. And we really don’t know much about our narrator – she is in such close focus that her broader identity and context is a mystery. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Chris Power’s Guardian review neatly summerises a central challenge of this book: “It puzzles me that it should talk so much about place and history while presenting such blurred versions of both”.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n What resonated with me was Bernstein trying to tackle questions around the purpose of service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem, I felt, was that I had, at a certain point, without noticing it, departed from the basic principle of my own wrong-doing on which my practice of good ought to have been based.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Bernstein is asking: is service and obedience an enrichment of one\u2019s own life, or is it a dumb, placid response bred into us over generations? Unfortunately, by the end, the answer doesn\u2019t come satisfyingly enough, in my opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, the question is interesting and novel and is posed flawlessly. Study for Obedience <\/em>is a captivating and worthy venture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nothing settled in place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1319,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books","category-recommended_cait"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1316"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1331,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316\/revisions\/1331"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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