From The Heart

By Susan Hill

Chatto & Windus, £10.99

Review by Malcolm Forbes

SUSAN Hill’s latest novel is a departure from her whodunnits and ghost stories. As a coming-of-age tale, From The Heart delivers neither thrills nor chills. What it does, though, with great skill and poignancy, is chart “the shift from being a girl to being a woman” and the devastation that ensues from bad judgement, wrong decisions and illicit desires.

In the first half of the book, Hill sketches the formative years of her unassuming protagonist in 1950s England. Olive Piper is a plain but popular 17-year-old preparing for her A Levels. She gets into university where she pursues her passion for literature and meets the leading man in a play who asks her out. So far so unremarkable. But innocent, too-trusting Olive becomes pregnant. No longer can she allow herself to be blithely buffeted along by unseen forces: finally she has to take charge and forge her own way.

And so the “looker-on” who was content to skulk around backstage is thrust into the glaring limelight. After weighing up her limited options, Olive takes refuge at St Jude’s, a home for unmarried mothers. There she gives birth to a baby boy who is swiftly taken from her and given up for adoption. Finding her feet again, she secures a job teaching English at a school for girls. But her equilibrium is soon threatened again, first by a debilitating illness and then by her love for an older, female colleague. Can she stay sane and happy while faced with the dual threat of public scandal and private heartache?

This novel finds Hill with a different agenda. Unable to spook or perplex her reader, she sets out to move us. So well drawn is her heroine, and so keenly realised her predicaments and misfortunes, that we feel for her at every turn. With trademark crisp, poised prose, Hill expertly articulates Olive’s panic as she flees alone to a dead-end, out-of-season seaside resort; her helplessness when up against unsympathetic doctors; her fear of developing a bond with her baby son (“Don’t let yourself love,” is advice she can’t heed); and her wrenching pain when at last she loses him.

From The Heart is about choices and their consequences. At one moment, Olive sits down with her large, “well corseted” stepmother and asks her two pertinent questions: “Do you feel that you made the right choice? Is this the life you wanted?” With these questions in mind, we follow Olive as she goes from a young, carefree ingénue able to choose what she studies and who she loves, to a woman afflicted with scars and regrets, who learns the hard way that society dictates just how free she can be. In her case, and in her time, her freedom of choice is cruelly restricted.

In her last pages, Hill sneaks in if not a twist then a nasty surprise. It makes for a fitting end to a captivating book, one rich with subtle and sudden drama.