Women’s Prize For Fiction, 2024: Soldier Sailor #LoveYourLibrary

This book is not for me. I say that a lot in reviews when I can see objectively that I’m reading something good but it hasn’t quite clicked; in the case of Soldier Sailor, Claire Kilroy’s fifth novel, it’s even more deeply true. Every page, not for me, not speaking to me. Soldier Sailor is about early motherhood. We follow the stream-of-consciousness of a new mother, Soldier, as she addresses her beloved son, Sailor. The material here is familiar to anyone who’s ever read a Mumsnet thread: how marriages that once felt equal collapse into familiar patriarchal norms after a child is born, and Daddy is still free to do what he wants while Mummy is now expected only to care and serve (‘He had a big day ahead but I only had little days’, our narrator says bitterly). Kilroy, for my money, is strongest when writing about the upending nature of maternal love, the sheer otherworldly intensity of how much Soldier loves Sailor and how the world somehow makes this normal when it’s anything but. ‘I would kill for you… I would kill others for you, I would even kill myself. I would even kill my husband if it came down to it.’ Soldier returns obsessively to this theme, desperate to tell us about this kind of love: ‘I had wanted to know who [my husband] would save if there was a fire… “you can only save one of us and it has to be our baby”… I knew I would leave my husband behind in the fire, I would leave him to burn’.

Kilroy totally achieves what she sets out to do: in particular, the sequences in the forest and the beach, when our narrator temporarily loses her grip on reality, are both moving and technically brilliant. Unfortunately, for me, what she sets out to do just isn’t that interesting. I’ve read so many books that do it already. In particular, I felt aggrieved on behalf of Sarah Moss’s Night Waking, which is about simultaneously mothering an insomniac toddler and paranoid eight-year-old, and which is funnier and sharper than Soldier Sailor. I also – this book is not for me – started to feel beaten over the head with how much our narrator wants to tell us that men and women are Just Different. Soldier doesn’t understand wine, mechanics, why people care about cars; walking in the dark always makes her scared; she’s pissed off at her husband for his total obliviousness, but does nothing about it. Why doesn’t she leave him? Unlike Moss’s Night Waking, which is good on the deep unspoken sexual bond between Anna and her husband, we barely get a glimpse of what drew these two to each other in the first place. And the trouble is, the more we’re told how Different men and women are, the more Soldier’s situation starts to feel inevitable rather than oppressive.

One of the most beautiful and resonant passages in this book is near the end, on the beach:

That night I made another grave error of judgement. I tried to save a girl who had drowned some years ago, bladderwrack tangled in her hair. She drowned before you were born, seconds before you were born, as she brought you into this world… That girl, you’d have liked her, but I left her for dead. Had to. This was a woman’s job.

As well as this works in the context of Soldier’s journey, however, it left me with a bad taste in my mouth, because it returns to the old story that it’s only by having children that women really grow up. This myth of motherhood is especially persistent, I think, because some parents compare their pre-child selves to their post-child selves and think, ah, I am much more of an adult now. The problem is that, even though I don’t have children, I am not the same self I was in my twenties; I have changed too. Interestingly, I can see it in my own responses to Night Waking, which I first read in my early twenties, when I thought I wanted kids in the future. In my first review of the novel, I found Anna’s relationship with her children a bit disturbing, because she is so emotionally honest (“Good morning,” said the Tiger [Who Came To Tea]. “I’m here to symbolise the danger and excitement that is missing from your life of mindless domesticity”‘. When I re-read it in my early thirties, I was cheering Anna on, having gained a much greater appreciation of the emotional labour of care work (‘”Mummy stop it raining”, “I can’t stop it raining. Believe me, if I had supernatural powers the world would be a very different place.”) I too am a woman, no longer a girl.

This speaks to the wider literary climate that may not have created Soldier Sailor but which has certainly contributed to the many accolades it has received: the idea that these stories of motherhood are still untold. If these books continue to resonate with so many readers, of course they deserve to exist. But it’s interesting that there seems to be a sense that women without children have had their turn and now we need to hear from mothers. Indeed, most women in fiction do not have children, but this is not because they are childless or childfree, but because they haven’t had children yet. Fiction is still obsessed with the coming-of-age and the young. Many writers have noted how this shafts middle-aged and older women, but there’s a particular cost here for the one in five women who never have children. The stories of women without children past childbearing age are just not getting told. Navigating this new era of life without experiencing the sudden ‘drowning’ of motherhood but still, knowing that the seas have changed, feels increasingly like sailing uncharted waters.

I borrowed this book from my local library #LoveYourLibrary