Frank Fisher’s butcher’s shop had been in business, he liked to tell people, for more than 300 years. A while back, a signpainter was commissioned to advertise this fact on an outside wall, in case any strangers should pass through the market town of Dronfield in Derbyshire and feel compelled to stop and inspect a time capsule. When I first visited, in January 2018, I found a low, square-windowed room tiled in faded beige and blue. Most of the interior was taken up by a walk-in meat larder, with just enough room left over for a counter, a crimson-stained cutting block and Frank himself. Saws and cleavers dangled, ominously, at throat height; you had to be careful not to impale yourself on the hooks that curled down from a black-lacquered carcass beam. Frank, who was 88 that year, moved with grace around the cramped space, having first come to work here as a teenager. When I asked how much had changed over the past 75 years, he took a good long look around and said: “The weighing scale used to be over there, love.”
The result is a deeply moving picaresque in which Veselka examines conditionality as a state of being. Placing her characters at the mercy of events, she evokes the feeling of a floating world, pushing back against the forward movement of the novel in favor of something more circular.
Through the lies and truths of this compelling novel, Ferrante threads one of her talismanic objects, not a doll this time, but a mysterious glittering bracelet that, as in a fairytale, passes from hand to desirable hand. Who is the fairest of us all may not be the right question for women to ask, or anyone to judge.
Thick orchards, all in white,
Stand ‘neath blue voids of light,
And birds among the branches blithely sing,
I am older now but I am green
Backyard climbing ivy green
Fern leaf outstretched green