Mary Cavanagh - Novelist

Another Great Review of A Man Like Any Other- with grateful thanks to Amanda Stock of Oxford Daily Information.

Thank you, Amanda for a really generous review, and also for mentioning the humour in A Man. I have tried to inject a running theme of humour, but I wonder sometimes if it might be overpowered by all the drama! Thank you too, for highlighting the Greenham Common section. It took me quite a bit of research for authentication, and it's part of 'my' history that needs remembering by others.

A Man Like Any Other by Mary Cavanagh
I was looking forward with keen interest to the next novel by Mary Cavanagh (The Crowded Bed) and A Man Like Any Other does not disappoint. Again, she is a spell-binding storyteller, and not a gentle one – she seizes you by the scruff of your imagination and plunges you head-first into a world of titanic passions and cruel consequences from which you cannot be released until the last page is turned. Again I had to stay awake till the wee small hours to devour the book in one sitting; and again it was an absolute delight. Her writing is fresh, pungent, surprising; often sharp and very funny. She is direct and forthright, doesn’t waste words; when I had finished I wished it had been much longer than its modest 200ish pages. Cavanagh’s leading characteristic as a writer is a superb boldness. She is unafraid, and unapologetic, to present you with breathtakingly big themes – death, grief, madness, devouring love, incest, jealousy, betrayal, murder – in combination with breathtakingly unlikely coincidences.
The story opens with the death of Lady Marina Proudfoot. She was a woman of both great personal and spiritual beauty, whose generous, brave and loving nature is deeply mourned by her surviving son Timothy and her priest-counsellor Father Ewan McEwan, whom she has been visiting for twenty-odd years after a horrible tragedy shattered her life in 1982 – her infant daughter and her much-loved husband both drowned. Soon we learn that Marina and Father Ewan were secret lovers, were in love, were inseparably entwined in one another, despite a fifteen year age gap. With the assistance of beautifully paced flashbacks we witness how Lady Marina Proudfoot started life as Molly O’Dowd, a beautiful young Irish girl in Oxford, chucked out by her vile mother after an unfortunate encounter with a fish porter from the covered market results in a teen pregnancy . . .

. . .Meanwhile Timothy also has a secret lover – his best friend Roger, married to Sally, a very nice woman who deserves better. Roger and Timothy are planning to Come Out at Marina’s funeral; Sally of course already knows and is leaving to start a new job at the bereavement counselling centre run by Father McEwan. Roger is a man of awesome selfishness and boundless vitality. His inner child is very close to the surface and his attempts to control his titanic rage when his devious plans are thwarted contribute greatly to our entertainment in the present-day parts of the story. His passion for the weak and petulant Timothy, and his hatred for Marina do not prepare us for a second devastating revelation which I will not by any means spoil.

There are occasional moments when your inner critic begins to say "Hang on a minute …", but so intense is your desire to find out what happens, or rather, why what happens happens, that you have no time or desire to listen to it, when every page delivers powerfully gripping stuff. For example, while discoursing back and forth through recent decades we are transported to the Greenham Common Embrace the Base day, to show us the steps that led the young about-to-be-ordained Ewan to pose for what became a world-famous image, Crucifix Man.

There are themes explored in the book that were also present in her first novel The Crowded Bed – the emotional grip of religion, the sense of guilt, the desire to hide painful secrets from early life, the catastrophic results of these secrets coming to light, the enthralling power of beauty, the enthralling power of big love – that hit home, and ground the novel with depth and sensitivity in the midst of a story that is almost over-stimulating in it succession of big events and emotional body-blows. In other words, this is a big, colourful, tasty paella of a story chock-full of delicious king prawns and chunks of spicy sausage – you are not going to be hungry again half an hour later. I loved it and unreservedly recommend it.