Review of The Artist's Daughter, by Caz Eddy

"‘Clearly there’s no point talking to you while you are in this mood,’ her father said, stubbing out his cigarette into the ashtray that always appeared and disappeared with him."

It is irritating enough for Saffron that her father talks to her as if she were still the child she was when he saw her last; it must be even more so that he still does it when he’s dead. Saffron is the child of an artist and a musician (hence the fancy name they stuck her with). Her mother died long since; now her estranged father, an artist called Neil Shaw, has also died, and left her his estate in Devon. 

On her way down to sort out his effects, the scenery might give her a hint of what is to come:

"The train glided along the edge of the River Exe. The tide was out and wading birds pecked at stranded marine life. Old timbers from wrecked boats jutted upwards from the muddy estuary bed, like broken teeth and unearthed rib cages. They steamed in the hot sun, temporarily drying their skeletal remains. The air conditioning in the carriage was broken and had been since London."

What is about to be “unearthed” is a great deal of resentment and misunderstanding about the past, much of which was also broken. The narrative alternates between past and present, between Saffron’s troubled childhood as the daughter of constantly arguing parents, and her adult self. A connecting link between them is Tom, her childhood friend who still lives in the area and figures largely in both strands. This narrative technique does a good job of marking the passage of time, differentiating between child and adult voices of the same character and seeding and delaying the reveal of information.

At first it may seem as if this is going to be a typical love story, with the progression from friendship to love between Saffron and Tom being key. But it gradually becomes clear that in fact the most important relationship is that between Saffron and her estranged father, who not only divorced her mother but abandoned his daughter after her mother’s death, and that until this is sorted out, nothing else can be. Since Neil is dead, this would seem to present a problem. But Saffron finds a cache of letters, which after his divorce he wrote but never sent to her. She also finds him, or at least his ghost, which seems to have been allowed to return to try to sort out what he has left undone – though even then, this hopeless non-communicator finds it difficult to actually say what he feels.

The novel, then, is much concerned with communication, or rather failures of communication, between people. It is leavened with quite a lot of wry humour, as in Saffron’s description of her father’s kitchen, “a bit like someone put the 70s in a blender and turned it on without putting the lid on”, and her reaction to Tom’s ultra-modern kitchen (he’s an architect), “This is one of those kitchens where you have to guess how to open the cupboard doors and find where the fridge is hiding, isn’t it?” There are some subtle touches, as when the giving away of a certain article, and a later offhand remark, "I wasn’t bothered about it”, shows, as nothing else could do, how Saffron’s mother, who did at least make efforts with parenthood, though it clearly did not come naturally to her, was actually far less emotionally important to her daughter than was the absent and inadequate Neil. 

Neil, both as human and ghost, does come over as a blend of the exasperating and the oddly sympathetic. Saffron’s parting words to one of his many mistresses, “My father was a shit, Mrs. Philips, we both know that, but he wasn’t a bad person”, encapsulate how she eventually comes to terms with his memory, and it seems fitting that he has the last word (an inaudible expletive).

The Artist’s Daughter can be bought here