Soldier Sailor: 'One of the finest novels published this year' The Sunday Times

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Davies, Stevie (31 August 2012). "The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy – Review". The Guardian. Guardian News and Media . Retrieved 13 November 2014. Such is the intensity of the world Kilroy creates, beginning with a frenetic prologue where the narrator is at the edge of some forest, at the edge of her own mind, really, close to abandoning her child. The chaotic action lands the reader in the middle of the madness, in media res, which is like opening a book at the worst point of a storm, without giving a context of where, when or who specifically is suffering. A story told by a woman who can’t get it together enough to say what is actually going on. This is a deliberate stylistic choice that may risk alienating readers initially but certainly works to reflect the trauma of new motherhood, the loneliness, guilt, the fog and incoherency.

So I played for my father another concerto, though he was never one for sitting still in a chair. He would make an exception for me, though, his firstborn. He would see the progress I have made.” Throughout these scenes of marital discord and homely mundanity is the narrator’s complicated feelings about being the mother of a son, and the concerns she has about the world he’ll grow into. "Parenting is gender segregation", she says at one point. I am tired. I am lonely. I have found myself mired in resentment in this new life, become a person I don’t wish to be, feeling constant guilt for not feeling constant gratitude for the blessing that is my child. I do feel constant gratitude: I adore my child. But I am tired. I am lonely. I am lost.” The job now is to reflect on middle age and mortality. We know we are going to die, it’s a very unpleasant piece of information. Are we in denial? My cousin died at 39, one of the school mums died at 37, both cancer. Christine was one of the infancy infantry and we watched her slowly die, that’s where the whole warrior thing comes from. She did the whole school run till she couldn’t manage the steps, then she’d wait at the top because she didn’t want to say goodbye. It was terrible. You have a human imagination and you try to shape those feelings into a story. We will die, we will lose each other. How do we accept that? I think that’s what it is, you don’t know what you’re writing or why till later.”Your whoops of excitement abated after a while and we continued in silence, the swing a pendulum marking time. Finally, another child queued behind me, relieving me from duty. I hauled you off and applied you to the bottom of a ladder. Up you chugged. You had to keep moving. It didn’t matter what you were moving on. I took a picture of you sliding down the yellow chute and sent it to my husband. Smiley face. Wow, this was intense. I'll never experience motherhood, but after reading this novel I'm quite relieved about that fact. Claire Kilroy imagines it all as psychological horror in this raw and visceral tale. The objective difference between the parenting experiences of mothers and fathers is laid bare, such as when the narrator considers men – like her husband – turning to films to feel connected to noble endeavours while women risk death for babies. "Tell me, men: when were you last split open from the inside?"

Soldier Sailor is the most uncompromising, provocative novel I’ve read in quite some time. . . As honest as fiction gets.’ JOHN BOYNE

As a young woman, I distinctly remember passing women pushing prams, thinking that’s not going to happen to me The Sailor of the title is the baby, while Soldier is the mother, one of the ‘infancy infantry’ performing the thankless daily drill of raising the next generation, ‘struggling to contain your screams while struggling to contain my own’ The tone of this new novel from Claire Kilroy reminded me very much of Bright Burning Things by Lisa Harding, Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan and Where I End by Sophie White. It is unflinching, brutal, raw, honest, intense, torrid. There are times when reading it that you'll want to look away (or put the book in the freezer as I've known @tiredmammybookclub to recommend), but the writing is so compelling you won't be able to put it down. More memorable, though, are the grim quips, such as when comparing little girls and their confidence to her son, or herself: "But don’t worry, Sailor: you’ll still be paid more than them."

A new mother is not peaceful but in a jittery state of high alert. We declare her serene so we can leave her to it. So we can behold the glittering surface, remark on its beauty, and walk away.' In her first novel for over a decade, Claire Kilroy takes us deep into the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love for a new life with a seismic change in identity, she vividly realises the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of love, autonomy and creativity. In Soldier Sailor she joins the litany of literary mothers who interrogate this, armed with a writer’s tools – language, intelligence and empathy – to illuminate the daunting task at hand, the all-consuming love, the sudden willingness to kill for their child. "I swear every woman in my position feels the same", her unnamed narrator says at the novel’s start. The impulse to shove my husband hard in the chest was so strong that I turned and staggered away to thwart it, grappling with the doors and bannisters that came rearing up at me as if I was on a conveyor belt because I wasn't in my right mind any more."Nicola Sturgeon has insisted she has “nothing to hide” but repeatedly refused to say whether she deleted messages sought by the UK Covid inquiry. The former first minister was challenged over reports that she destroyed communications that have been requested by the investigation. The Scottish... Nicola Sturgeon has insisted she has “nothing to hide” but repeatedly refused to say whether she deleted messages sought by the UK Covid inquiry. The former first minister was challenged over reports that she destroyed communications that have been requested by the investigation. The Scottish... Nicola Sturgeon has insisted she has “nothing to hide” but repeatedly refused to say whether she deleted messages sought by the...

Saying mothers need ‘me time’ is like saying homeless people need homes. You need to give mothers me time. Someone has to mind the baby.” As Soldier asks: “Who mothers the mothers?” At the same time, Kilroy depicts the dangerously fierce love a mother feels for her child: 'We all go bustling about, pushing shopping trolleys or whatever, acting like love of this voltage is normal; domestic even. That we know how to handle it. But I don't.' This love is intensified by some of the heart-stopping moments encountered in the course of an ordinary day or night - a bumped head, a dropped knife, refusing to eat, raging fevers, frequent meltdowns. As Soldier remarks, 'this was freelance motherhood: struggling to contain your screams while struggling to contain my own, which were louder and angrier and scared us both.' Kilroy’s phrasing strikes the balance between lyrical, in the mode of a no doubt great inspiration, Sylvia Plath, and realistic, the short, often grandiose aphorisms of thought: "Loss of self, loss of self – hard to bear."Neil Parish is the Tory who was caught watching porn in the Commons. Now he stars in Channel 4’s Banged Up