The Mapmaker's Wife
by Hannah Evans
15 November 2024
I was doing that thing where I’m browsing in the library and there’s just too much choice. Shelf after shelf passes by and I’m not picking anything up. Eventually I just pick a shelf and tell myself to get something from here and be done with it. This was the book I picked. It was a good choice! But initially it annoyed me.
Mostly it was the title. “The Someone’s Wife” is a really common book title. “The Someone’s Husband” is, as far as I can tell, pretty much never used as a book title. And that’s a reflection of society and the way things have been (and perhaps still are). The reasons that the title annoys me are also the reasons why it’s a good book title.
The book starts out in 1954 when Beatrice Bell, the daughter of a well off family in Grenada, meets Patrick Anderson, a visiting mapmaker working for the British Government. And as you’d expect there’s a romance and Bea becomes the title character. But this isn’t a romance, at least not the sort that’s concluded with a marriage, and the story really takes off when the couple leave Grenada.
It’s very much a story of British colonialism as the young mixed-race couple struggle with the realities of life in the UK and on postings to Africa. It was the most unputdownable book I’ve read for a while and I raced through wanting to know what happened next but also the characters were so well written I wanted to spend time with them. There’s another thread to the story which takes place in 2015 in Grenada in which it’s clear from early on that the characters must connect to the other story but working out how isn’t obvious and the reader wants to find out how everything is going to match up. It’s a pretty standard narrative structure with flash forwards that don’t quite seem right but it’s gripping. I wasn’t surprised to find out at the end that the author is playing ‘what if’ with her own family history, and I won’t spoil the book for you by telling you what the ‘what if’ was. I thought the characters were superbly drawn, there are no bad guys, no one to blame, just real seeming people who love each other but often struggle to express that.
So, a good read, and I recommend it. But if anyone is wanting to write a book with a flip the tables narrative I suggest “The Someone’s Husband” as an option. I think the chances of anyone doing that with a non-superstar job title in it are slim; “The President’s Husband” would obviously make a good book title, sadly we’ve entered the timeline where that stays fictional for a while yet.
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