Review: The Lemon Grove - Helen Walsh

Helen Walsh’s new novel arrives with a reputation for being steamy. This isn’t new territory for the author; her debut, Brass (2004), was an unflinching depiction of a hedonistic young woman’s life which drew comparisons with Irvine Welsh. At the time, much was made of Walsh’s own wild youth:  the Guardian’s review mentioned her ‘dropping her first E before her first period or kiss, and working as a "fixer" hooking up male punters with transvestite prostitutes in Barcelona’.

Brass was very much a ‘coming of age’ novel, a young woman putting the excesses of adolescence behind her; age is an important factor in The Lemon Grove too. Set in Deia, an upmarket tourist area of Mallorca, the novel tells the story of a family holiday disrupted by the arrival of a stranger. Although the novel is told in the third person, the narrative follows Jenn, who has already been on the island for a week with her husband Greg, a university lecturer. We are quickly told that this holiday is a family tradition, but this year is different – Greg’s daughter Emma (15) will only be joining them halfway through, and she is bringing her boyfriend, Nate, with her.

It quickly becomes apparent that Jenn is feeling a sense of marital drift, along with a hint of midlife crisis; the sense of ‘being here, yet being invisible’. A curious quirk is that she seems to judge everyone she sees by their breasts, so we are introduced to sunbathers with ‘ravaged bodies’, or ‘breasts which are slack and massive’. Standing out from the rest is a glamorous ‘hippy chick’, proudly showing off her ‘firm, full breasts’. Jenn herself is not exempt from this physical reductionism; she is sleeping outdoors, topless, when Emma and Nate arrive, a crime for which she is furiously rebuked by her step-daughter: ‘it’s not what you should be doing at your age… you look common’.

Jenn has caught glimpses of Nate before, dismissing him as a ‘gauche bushbaby’, but the holiday gives her an opportunity to examine him further. On the first morning, he walks past, ‘wearing a pair of plain blue swimming shorts, otherwise he is naked before her. He is muscular, but graceful with it, balletic’; a contrast to her somewhat pompous and ponderous husband. Jenn begins comparing herself with her beautiful stepdaughter, and going over the missed opportunities in her own life (‘she was once that girl, holding out, holding it all in, hanging on to her virtue… if she had her time again, Jenn O’Brien would bound upstairs and unquestionably be one of those girls’) – putting herself in Emma’s shoes, she finds herself drawn to the mysterious, surly young man sharing their villa.

As in Deborah Levy’s Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home, the presence of a young, sexually-charged stranger in the holiday home triggers a shift in the family’s power dynamics. As the holiday goes on, accidents befall Greg and Emma, leaving them incapacitated with shock and a broken ankle respectively. With Emma out of the way, Nate begins to switch his affections towards the older woman, and undermining her husband. The relationship between Emma and Jenn see-saws rapidly between affection and mistrust. Sneaking into Nate’s room, Jenn finds a pair of Emma’s ‘sluttish sex-panties’, streaked with Nate’s semen. Shocked by this assertion of Emma’s adulthood (she had previously bought all her knickers for her, in neutral tones), Jenn retires to the bathroom, shaving her pubic hair, returning herself to a pre-pubescent state. The whole holiday becomes riven with mistrust; Emma and Nate quarrel over the latter’s relationship with the ‘hippy chick’ – Jenn is also jealous. Greg receives regular phone calls from withheld numbers. The villa’s egregious landlord is a constant, voyeuristic presence.

The relationship between Jenn and Nate soon turns physical (Nate is 17 – Jenn may be pushing boundaries, but remains within the law), with the younger man unexpectedly taking the lead. These scenes are intense and graphic, as in Brass, and Walsh generally writes them well: there’s the odd dodgy line (at one point Nate ‘threads her tresses round his fingers’), but on the whole it stays the right side of sexy. That’s not to say that you’d read The Lemon Grove for the quality of its prose, though. Walsh does occasionally lapse into cliché, for example when Jenn lets out a ‘silent howl of rage’, late on in the novel.

The Lemon Grove is a good piece of escapism, a holiday read to titillate and entertain, although it would be hard to make many claims for it beyond that. Walsh has a reputation for tackling difficult subjects (wild adolescent girls, rape, racism, post-natal depression), but this novel feels a little less bold, for all the explicit descriptions. Some of the characters are under-developed; Greg lacks the donnish air his job implies, feeling more like a middle manager than a passionate admirer of the Romantic poets, and Emma remains something of an enigma. By contrast, Nate seems preturnaturally self-confident and domineering. Some of the set-pieces also feel contrived - a series of accidents feel too much like deus ex machina -  and towards the end, the plot appears to resolve itself rather too neatly, though Walsh does leave some room for ambiguity.

In a recent interview, Walsh spoke of a new trend towards female anti-heroes in literature, including Zoe Pilger’s Eat My Heart Out, and the ubiquitous Gone Girl. In many ways, Walsh was ahead of the curve with Brass, which stands up well alongside the likes of Pilger, and Emma-Jane Unsworth’s upcoming second novel, Animals, but The Lemon Grove feels more like playing catch-up. An enjoyable contribution to the genre, but not essential.