SOURCE: Field, Michele. “Shena Mackay: The Menace of the Domestic.” Publishers Weekly 243, no. 49 (2 December 1996): 36-8.

[In the following positive review of The Orchard on Fire, Field praises Mackay's sense of the macabre and provides an overview of her literary career.]

The annals of contemporary fiction are full of authors of highly praised but little-known books. Few have produced a body of work that is as fresh and evocative as the 11 volumes that Shena Mackay has written since 1964. Her latest, The Orchard on Fire, a Booker Prize nominee, recently published Stateside by Moyer-Bell, displays her sharp eye for the macabre and humorous domestic dramas of the English middle class.

Mackay (pronounced to rhyme with “reply”) is the most mysterious of the six authors to be shortlisted for this year's Booker. This is partly because she attends fewer literary parties than she is invited to: she lives in an outer-London neighborhood that is beyond the reach of the tube. But it is not only her seclusion that has maintained her mystery—she also doesn't belong to a literary clique that might spread gossip about her.

In person, Mackay, 52, is a striking figure, whose beautiful white pageboy haircut and quiet voice lend her an air of invulnerability; it somehow takes 10 minutes to absorb the fact that she is also nervous. Mackay answers PW's questions as if she were in a doctor's office and is careful to be accurate. She refuses to hedge, freely telling her American audience more about herself than most British readers know from the few interviews she's given in recent years.

The narrator of The Orchard on Fire is a young girl with whom an elderly married man has fallen in love, and who is beset by feelings of bewilderment and entrapment as his pursuit turns into psychological molestation. The novel subtly shows how life goes on with girlish things despite the bad scripts of adult lives. All of Mackay's books are about the charged emotional lives of very ordinary middle-class nailbiters.

Mackay was born in Edinburgh, the second of three sisters. Her parents were intellectuals who had met in college, but none of the girls pursued higher education. The burned plastic smell of families melting apart surrounds Mackay's life story and the stories in her books. “My mother was a schoolteacher, but she got rheumatoid arthritis when she was in her 30s and got progressively worse,” says Mackay. “It was a fairly tempestuous marriage and I left home at 16, around the time they split up. They had ambitions for their daughters initially, but the ambitions petered out.

“My mother died about four years ago, and I see my dad quite regularly now. I never lost touch with him entirely [as the rest of the family did]. But I don't consciously put my family into my books, and the family in The Orchard on Fire is not my family; it is more Louisa May Alcott, an invented ideal family that is not mine. There is some of my childhood in The Orchard, but it is more a feeling than specific incidents.”

Unlike the protagonist of The Orchard on Fire, Mackay grew up in an urbane, literary environment. Her parents knew various Scottish writers who were living in London and had a circle of painter friends. “The bohemian lifestyle did seem interesting,” Mackay laughs. “It was what I wanted to do.”

A PRECOCIOUS START

At age 16, Mackay won her first literary competition (with a poem she wrote at 14) and through that met other writers. Throughout her life, she has been close to art critic David Sylvester (who recently curated the Francis Bacon show at the Pompidou Center in Paris). “I did meet lots of painters—the old Colony Room crowd like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud,” she says.

When Mackay left school at 16, she worked in an antique shop in Chancery Lane owned by David Sylvester's sister Jackie, who in turn was married to Frank Marcus (who wrote The Killing of Sister George). “Frank Marcus was manager of the silver shop and I was 17 when I showed him something I'd written, and he showed it to his agent, who showed it to a publisher. It was Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumberger and it was far too short, but they said if I would write something else they would publish it. So I wrote Toddler on the Run.”

Mackay had just turned 20 when both works were published in one volume by Andre Deutsch. She found her first agent immediately in Peter JansonSmith. Shortly thereafter, when another member of the firm, Deborah Rogers, left to form her own agency (now Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd), Mackay moved with her. “II think I am her oldest living client,” she muses.

Mackay married a former school friend, a petro-chemist named Robin Brown (whom she divorced in the 1980s), moved out of London and wrote three more books while raising three daughters—two by Brown, one by Sylvester. Then from 1971 to 1983, nothing was heard of her.

Pressed to explain why she left the literary fast lane after such a promising start, it becomes clear that the pressures of raising three daughters, often singlehandedly, played a significant role. “It was not so much deliberate as it just happened. I didn't give up, but I did write a novel which has never been published—which now looks like a rough draft of A Bowl of Cherries, which was published in 1984. Indeed my publisher, Jonathan Cape, rejected A Bowl of Cherries, too, but I was friends at that time with the writer Brigid Brophy and she showed it to Iris Murdoch, who helped see that it was published by a firm called Harvester.” She pauses, and adds with a smile: “I think Harvester just does CD-ROMs now.”

Apart from small jobs in libraries and shops, Mackay has always written. Her first novel to be published in the States was her third in Britain, Old Crow (McGraw-Hill, 1967). Later that year, Simon & Schuster brought out Toddler on the Run as its own volume. “Then nothing in the States at all,” she says. “‘Too English,’ I was told.

“But a few years ago, I heard from Moyer-Bell.” It was critic and novelist Francis Wyndham, whose Whitbread Award-winning novel, The Other Garden, is also published by the small, Rhode-Island-based press, who first introduced co-publisher Jennifer Moyer to Mackay's work. Moyer-Bell has since released a collection of Mackay's stories called Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags (1994), two novels in 1992, Dunedin and A Bowl of Cherries, and an anthology of short stories about sisters that Mackay edited called Such Devoted Sisters (1994).

HAROLD PINTER IN THE KITCHEN

Mackay's signature is recognizable from book to book: a sense of menace below the check-pattern of middle-class life; a subliminal eroticism charging everything (“but no blow-by-blow sex scenes,” Mackay points out); and a very sharp definition of time and place, of brand names and domestic manners—altogether, as if Harold Pinter were taking you through the contents of his kitchen cupboards.

Why does nothing in her discussion of these books suggest that most of them end in death? “Well, there is a death per page in the first two novellas, and I think I have fewer deaths now,” she laughs. “Still, one or two.”

“Old Crow, like The Orchard on Fire, is set in Kent,” Mackay says when asked what in her life has given rise to the peculiar mix of hilarity, surrealism and gloom that animate the commonplace world of her books. “I lived in Kent from the age of eight to 15—though it is a very fictionalized version of a village called Shoreham, where William Blake and Samuel Palmer once lived. I don't actually have roots—though I feel Scottish and I go back there—but I do feel very strongly about Kent.

“You can read my biography,” she says, in the two books that followed Old Crow, Music Upstairs (1965) and An Advent Calendar (1971), both of which concern a young married couple. “Both, I think, have a mixture of humor and sadness and ends on a note of muted optimism. ‘Black humor’ is what the reviewers said, and of course there is that, but it is a very easy label. A lot of my humor is punning as well, and slapstick.”

Redhill Roccoco (1986) was written around the time of her divorce, when she and the girls moved to a suburb of “happy-clappy” Christians, as she calls them. “I used to like going to church, but I hate this kind of enthusiasm, so I don't go to church now. I like an evensong, the pews three-quarters empty, a few candles.” She is being ironic but truthful. Her eldest daughter, Sarah, and her husband are members of a Christian organization that has sent them to Pakistan to work with Afghan refugees. Mackay hopes to visit them in March.

Dunedin stands out among Mackay's work because it abandons the suburbs of modern London that she has made her own for New Zealand at the beginning of the century (“a New Zealand of my imagination, since I hadn't been there”). It is the only occasion when she has not written about a remembered past. “The book was about empire and the damage colonialists can do. And the contemporary scenes are set among vagrants on the streets of London. I was drawing an analogy between a Scottish family who went out to New Zealand and how it all went wrong for them; and how everything has gone wrong in London.”

When she wrote The Orchard on Fire, Mackay returned to the same tone as her earlier books, but for the first time she wrote in the first person. “And I wrote it in a completely narrative-linear way: I mean I just sat down and wrote it after putting it off and putting it off. I know I put writing off because once you enter it, you know you will be in a very intense state and won't want to be interrupted. So if you have other commitments in life, it is very easy not to start.”

Mackay is slowly making inroads with American readers. Both Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags and A Bowl of Cherries, a novel about two unhappily married authors of detective fiction, received glowing reviews in the New York Times Book Review. At press time, she has just concluded her first American book tour, which culminated at the Illinois Humanities Council Literary Festival in Chicago, where 250 fans turned out to hear her read from her four books published here.

She has previously made just two trips to New York, both private holidays for less than a week. “I actually hate book tours but I pretend to like them when I want to go somewhere like Chicago, which I have only seen in the movies. I remind myself that there is no such thing as a free lunch,” she says wryly.

Today, Mackay is as prolific as ever. Moyer-Bell's edition of Dreams is a compilation of three short story collections previously issued in England and she is building up to the publication of still another story collection. Mackay has continued to write short stories although her longer fiction is in demand. The novels are more lucrative, but the money question does not hound her. “Let's say money has always been problematic, up and down, and often more down than up.”

Mackay lives in a one-bedroom flat and when she has people to stay “well, it would be lovely to have them stay comfortably. My second daughter, Rebecca, is married and has a little boy, Harry, who is 18 months, and she is expecting another baby in December. Grandchildren are the most wonderful thing, and I want to be able to afford a house somewhere for them and me.” Cecily Brown, 27, Mackay's third daughter (the daughter of David Sylvester), is a painter living in New York who illustrated the jacket of the British edition of The Orchard on Fire.

British critics have compared Mackay to authors ranging from Dickens to Ronald Firbank and Muriel Spark, but she seems far too vivid to be a clone of somebody else. An unconventionally glamorous woman, doting grandmother and a writer who sees the world with witty intelligence and heartbreaking clarity, she deserves her own place in the literary pantheon.