Book Review: Ellipsis by Nikki Dudley

In the interest of full disclosure I must preface this with the caveat that Nikki Dudley is the partner of my brother. That said, I endeavour to make this as balanced and honest a review as any I write.

Read: May 2010

Ellipsis in one tweet-sized chunk:
Rewarding, psychologically complex, and disconcerting, Nikki Dudley's portrayal of everyday disconnect from life will delight readers looking for something different in the mystery genre.


“Right on time.”

These are the words that Daniel Mansen mouths to Alice as she pushes him to his death in front of a London underground train. She’s been stalking him for weeks: obsessed by the red of his scarf; drawn to him by a force she has followed blindly, without question or thought. But these strange words change everything. Did she know Daniel? Was this murder not an act of free, albeit pathologically imbalanced, will? Confused, Alice begins to investigate and as she does she discovers that there are gaps, not just in what she knows about Daniel, but what she knows about herself.

Across town, Daniel’s cousin Thom discovers a note in Daniel’s empty bedroom with the time and place of his death written on it. Fearing that it confirms that Daniel committed suicide, he too sets off to investigate, hoping that some sort of certainty will help fill the increasing and explained void in his own life.

Each a refugee from their past, Alice and Thom become knotted together in the search for answers. It is only as they unravel the mystery surrounding Daniel’s death that they see how many other ropes still bind them.
Revolving around the ellipses in each of their understanding, in all that has gone unsaid in the footnotes of their past, Ellipsis is a slippery, satisfying and unusual novel that never quite gives the reader what they want – and it’s all the better for it. They are the most unreliable of narrators, and with the reader placed in their shoes and never privilege to information they aren’t, it makes for a compulsive, page-turning read driven forwards by the increasingly blinkered obsession of its protagonists.

In many ways they are mirror-images of each other, with Alice gradually emerging from the wasteland of severe psychological distress while Thom descends rapidly toward it. They each have a separate narrative voice: Alice, lost and alone, commentates on her own adventures in first person, as if in conversation with her absent mum, where as Thom, investigating on behalf of his family, is referred to in the third person. This dichotomy is representative of a wider theme in Ellipsis, the encumbrance of family which can both liberate and constrain, often at the same time.

Ideas such as these are conveyed astutely, without unnecessary embellishment or hyperbole. The same can be said of the London they live in: dampened down, grim and self-contained. It is the cold concrete grey of a London winter without any technological or social distraction to bring it alive. Their London is a city without colour, and the monochrome atmosphere is broken only by the occasional flash of vivid red – Alice’s favourite colour – that provides a visceral injection of life into the proceedings, similar to that presented by the little girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List. Alice has a deep, compulsive attraction to red, yet it is never really explained, just another ellipsis left flapping in the breeze of one of the most open-ended novels I’ve read in a long time.

Dudley is originally a poet and it shows: her descriptions are exact and visually evocative, particularly when it comes to character. At one point an old women is described as having a face like “a fruit gone bad, folding and collapsing into itself.” This is Dudley’s greatest strength, but at times the similes and metaphors are piled too high, with the result that they lose a little of their lustre. In between stunning description there is a tendency for the prose to become a little repetitive, particularly in the third person passages – “Thom walks…”, “Thom kneels…”, “Thom whispers…”. In this sense her style generally calls to mind that of Doris Lessing or Nadine Gordimer; it is prickly and no-nonsense, more concerned with substance than the niceties of smooth flowing prose. A good editor could perhaps have rounded the edges, and cut some of the more flabby passages, but this is largely a matter of personal preference.

What I love about Ellipsis is its opacity. Information is released gradually, and in a way that tends to provoke more questions than answers. For a debut novelist Dudley shows impressive authorial confidence to leave so much open-ended. At times this can be frustrating, particularly in relation to Thom, who remains aloof for much of the first half and doesn’t fully emerge from his shell until the closing pages. He is often used a blank slate against which to compare Alice, who is the real star of the novel. She is a wonderfully flawed hero, easy to identify with, whose development arc is both compelling and cathartic.

Ellipsis is rewarding, psychologically complex, and disconcerting; Dudley has an often startling eye for description, and her portrayal of everyday disconnect will delight readers looking for something slightly different in the mystery-thriller genre.

Sparkling Books, April 2010, 9781907230103, 304pp

7 out of 10

The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing

Read: November 2007

The Golden Notebook is the best known and most widely acclaimed of all the works that went to earning Doris Lessing the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature. It tells the story of Anna Wulf and her efforts to maintain a semblance of sanity in a world that seems to be falling apart. She is a free woman: financially comfortable thanks to the success of her bestselling novel, emotionally self sufficient and committed to her bohemian lifestyle of passionate politics and frequent affairs. But she is terrified of the chaos she feels all around her: the violence and suffering across the world, her writers block, the way her mind feels like its cracking up. So in an attempt to make sense of the chaos she begins to record her life in four coloured notebooks, a black one to address her problems as a writer; red for recording her political life; yellow her relationships and emotions; and the blue becomes a diary of everyday events. But it is the Golden Notebook which holds the key to her renaissance and recovery, both as a writer and a person.

The Golden Notebook is not a feminist treaty, nor a political diary of the break up of British communism, but the intensely individual story of one woman’s struggle to reconcile her own life with the political and philosophical atmosphere of her age, to make sense of the chaos she feels all around her. It is a spectacularly intimate journey through the mind of Anna Wulf, a young novelist whose life is falling apart.

It is also one of the most impressive works you will read this year. But that doesn’t mean it is easy reading. If you are looking for a plot driven, exciting page turner then this is not the book for you. If you love lyrical, poetic prose then this is not the book for you. Doris Lessing has a clunky, disjointed and sometimes ugly style of writing which is difficult to fall in love with.

However, there is a triumvirate of qualities a book can contain and in the last of these The Golden Notebook achieves spectacularly. It may not be enticingly exciting or beautiful written, but it is seriously interesting, intelligent and well constructed. It is a book which deals with big ideas, which will teach you something about yourself and the world around you. Few books are as intellectually rewarding as this. And because of this vociferous intelligence and insight, given time and space it is possible to forget all its faults almost completely. Even the prose begins to read smoothly. If you persist, The Golden Notebook is a book you can easily hibernate within for a few cool autumnal weeks.

Doris Lessing is on the same level as Milan Kundera in her awareness of the psychological intricacies of her characters, their shifts in mood are examined with subtlety and experience. She is able to speak plainly and intelligently on any subject, from sex to society and her insight is often astounding. Never have I read a book and come away from it more certain that I knew nothing about myself.

Through her perceptive and articulate eyes we are taken on a journey into the 1950’s, into a time which seems so like our own and yet is not. We watch on as she struggles to reconcile her political and moral beliefs with the world around her: a world in which Stalin is being exposed for his crimes in the Soviet Union, the British Communist Party is collapsing under the weight of its members disillusionment, and in America Senator McCarthy’s ‘Red Terror’ is decimating the left wing intelligentsia. It is a world in which Anna excels in her bohemian lifestyle and affairs with married men but feels increasingly empty and hates herself for craving the security of love, for she sees it as giving in to all that feminine sentimentality that she wishes to be above. Those who say Ian McEwan’s recent novel On Chesil Beach accurately conveys the sexual inadequacies of the British populace pre-1966 would do well to read this and note how Anna dissects the emotional and physical side of sex both intelligently and erotically. This novel is a far cry from the prim and proper 1950’s world we are accustomed to reading about.

Her account of life and psychology as a young, bohemian, communist, women in the 1950’s is sumptuously detailed. The impossible contradictions of her life, the exhilarating joy one minute and the periods of guilt and manic depression the next. It seems that more than any other of her books, this is Doris Lessing’s most autobiographical novel, a novel into which she has poured every experience she had ever had into her characters. And because of this The Golden Notebook has an air of honesty which has few equals anywhere in literature.

However, on the other side it shows extraordinary disdain for everything outside Anna’s field of experience. The middle classes are seen in the typical stereotype as boring, repressed and politically naive. Men are all philandering, sexual predators, emotionally stunted and childlike. But Anna is obsessed with them treating her terribly. The worse they behave towards her, the more sexually excited she becomes. So it is unclear whether this is really a social commentary or a personal story about one very rounded and believable character whose vision of the world is blinkered by her social and political station. I chose to see it as the latter, because otherwise I resent these one dimensional portraits greatly.

In short Anna is a fascinatingly self destructive character and in the analysis of the world through her mind The Golden Notebook is a fascinating and powerful novel about a woman fighting to stay sane in a truly crazy world. And there are few more universal subjects in the world as that.


6.5 out of 10