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Bodies Politic |
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Bodies Politic
Michiel Heyns ISBN 9781868422982 Publication date 2008 RRP R 170 Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Award 2007. Three women look back in old age at a past they shared, not always harmoniously: Emmeline Pankhurst, the formidable suffragette; her daughter Sylvia; and Helen, who was loved by Harry, the neglected son of Emmeline and beloved brother to Sylvia. Through the narrative of each woman flits the figure of Christabel, Mrs Pankhurst’s favourite daughter: selfish, vain but irresistible. The three accounts, sometimes contradictory, sometimes confirmatory, reconstruct piece by piece the events surrounding Harry’s death and the human entanglements behind, indeed at times driving, the public acts of the time. Around these extraordinary women and their men Michiel Heyns has woven a novel of complex motivations disrupting the apparent unity of the Women’s Movement: Sylvia’s resentment of her mother’s treatment of Harry, Emmeline’s bitterness at Sylvia’s public opposition to her and her horror at Sylvia’s illegitimate child, Helen’s ambivalent feelings at having been summoned by Sylvia to Harry’s deathbed with an extraordinary request: ‘Tell him you love him; he has only three weeks to live.’ Against the background of massive public events – the struggle for the vote for women, the First World War – Bodies Politic examines, in fictionalised form, the private lives of the participants in these events, and the need for causes to be manifested in specific human bodies, in all their strength and weakness. Moving, dramatic and at times grimly humorous, Bodies Politic is an entirely original account of great love and bitter resentment, political victory and personal defeat; but ultimately of the indomitable spirit that escapes the shackles of the body. |
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