*Please note: There are spoilers..

This review is from the NutterMother Book Club

Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin is an entertaining enough read for a rainy day. For all its 425 pages the storyline did move along nicely, however, it did have its flaws.

Slammerkin is a dark book. Donoghue weaves a story set in 1763 England based loosely on a true story of a servant girl (Mary Saunders) who kills her mistress because she longed for “fine clothes.” From this outline Donoghue gives us a gritty story of a girl, who grows up moderately educated for her time and is thrown into a world of prostitution. Throughout her attempts to survive her circumstances, she one day strives to move up from her meagre station in life to one that would permit her to own fine clothes.

We are taught early on that Mary’s motivations for her rough life choices are plainly materialistic. For example, at 14 she sells her body for piece of ribbon. Clearly not the choice her mother would have liked her to make and Mary’s pregnancy from the encounter is what ultimately gets her kicked out of the family home and put out on the streets.

As a prostitute, Mary makes her living with Doll, another Slammerkin, who also rely on her body to earn a living, and acts as a mentor for the young girl. Here, I believe Donoghue has a real knack for storytelling in a linear fashion. However, she misses the mark when it comes to emoting anything from her main character. As the reader we know Mary puts up with prostituting because it buys her the ‘fine’ garments she had always wanted as a child. It also gives her the opportunity to eke out a living without the servitude she has seen her mother and peers grind out over the years for nothing more than a few scraps at dinner and roof over their heads. But we are never brought into the emotional world of Mary, and by the end of the novel this not only becomes very evident, but also changes the potential of this novel from becoming a moving piece of work.

Donoghue’s story is broken up into two portions. The initial half details Mary’s life in London as a child and prostitute. The story is told from her perspective alone, and would have benefited from the additional view points of other charters such as Doll and Matron Butler. This does not become a distraction until the second portion of the novel.

In part two we are taken through Mary’s ‘new’ life in Monmouth. She is working for Mrs. Jones one of her mother’s childhood friends. And Mary’s journey transforms as she initially decides to alter her life and attempt one at servitude. Although the story itself is still intriguing to read, what is most frustrating is that Donoghue decides to introduce not only new characters into the story but offers their new perspectives as well, and no longer is the story told purely from Mary’s side.

The most irritating factor of this is that Donoghue does not fully develop these new characters either. They are all very interesting individually, and have great side storylines, but she doesn’t explore them, and uses these characters solely as a method to push the story along.

And as I read through the second section of the novel, and the perspective changed I keep feeling like this would have been really beneficial in the first part of the novel, had she incorporated this into some of her initial characters. I wanted to know why Doll was a prostitute, why Matron Butler had higher hopes for Mary at the Magdalene, where Caesar came from, and why her mother erased her daughter from her life so easily.

The first half of the story left me wanting far more than I was given. As a result I had higher expectations for the second half of the story too still resolve some of those issues.  Although Donoghue was frivolous with her back story lines in the second portion, I had thought these new perspectives would make the book more cyclical – and she had the opportunity to do it.

For example we are introduced Abi, Mrs. Jones Barbadian servant. Throughout her story line we are given tidbits of her past life as a servant and the story of her struggles while crossing over to England. Mary is insistent throughout the latter half of the novel that that black people can live in London freely. So by the time Abi finally runs away at the end of the story we would almost expect her to run into a character like Cesar we are introduced to in section one to round out Abi’s story, unfortunately Donoghue just alludes to Abi being lost figuratively and literally on the streets of London.

Another oddity of her additional perspectives is Donoghue’s inability to express all the motivations of some of her characters. With the introduction of Mrs. Ash, we learn she is a pious woman, whose husband runs away, and she spends the remainder of the novel trying to oust Mary for various sinister reasons. However, during her big ‘reveal’ moment after the death of Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Ash, asks her master, Mr. Jones, if he would ever marry again. It turns out he does and to Rhonda Davies, Donoghue finishes her storyline with “Mrs Ash turned her face away so he wouldn’t see the break”... Are we now supposed to assume that Mrs Ash had harboured feelings for Mr Jones this entire time? Where did these feelings come from, all her inner dialogue was centered on her suspicions of Mary, nothing ever suggested that she had anything feels deeper than that.

Donoghue’s biggest flaw was particularly with the development of Mary’s character. She created a character who insisted on living her life ‘free’ with no one to tell her how to live it. As she did so Mary fully felt she deserved to be able to achieve all the materialistic ideals she wanted out of life as well. These are completely understandable sentiments of a character who is a moderately educated girl of 13. Clearly her ideals are a bit backwards and that makes Mary extremely interesting.

Donoghue had all the opportunity in the world to create a person who didn’t function well in society because she didn’t have the maturity to function in it. Mary had no emotional tools to develop as a character, and as the story progressed and some of these tools could have seemingly been instilled into her by either Matron Butler or Mrs. Jones, they were easily rejected because a stronger force was instilled into Mary. The fact that Mary was a damaged child is clearly is what is preventing Mary from growing as a person. Unfortunately Donoghue never illustrates this. Donoghue could have expressed Mary’s inability to register as moral human, and as a result the reader could have more identified with the character and her inability to change. Donoghue’s underdevelopment of her main character, made it hard for the reader to feel any emotion for girl who kills Mrs. Jones. It scene is lacklustre and Mary’s days in prison afterwards are merely the denouement to the novel, they are emotionless and surprisingly makes this book a bit of a letdown.

The opportunity to really understand who Mary was could have been incredible possible throughout the novel.  Donoghue never developed this idea of a damaged child, nor did she express Mary’s inability to understand gratitude or grow as a character. Instead she created a series of unemotional events that transpired together to tell a story.

At the end of the novel I felt like so much good writing was put to waste, at 425 pages already what would have been the harm of another 50 of real character development?

All in all, it wasn’t an awful book, and this is primarily due to the authors engaging subject matter, unfortunately it just left you wanting.

I hate it when that happens...

Ironically Emma Donoghues, latest novel Room, is getting excellent praise, not my usual cup of tea, but I was so intrigued by the popularity of it that I have my name on a copy...at the library.