Helen Dunmore is not as overtly political as many of the women writers whose roots lie in the women's liberation movement of the late 1960s, such as Margaret Atwood and Fay Weldon. However, Helen Dunmore's novels have two enormous strengths. One is the outstandingly poetic quality of her writing. She relies on the power of language itself. Consider, for example, this description of the bustling, decaying Commercial Road in east London:
'The long file of cars is the only wealth in these streets. Banks have closed, shops are boarded and drifts of uncollected post bulge back through letter-boxes. Metal shutters the colour of mercury fillings cover Pizza Perfect. A row of derelict factories shows jagged teeth of broken glass braced by razor wire.'
The second reason why Helen Dunmore's work deserves attention is the subject matter. Her novels do not deal with grand themes and great public eventsrather, they tend to be quite personal and limited in scopebut what is lost in breadth is more than made up for in depth and intensity. Her most recurring theme is that of sexuality, and the consequences of repressing it.
Her first published novel, Zennor in Darkness, is a rites of passage novel about three young women growing up in Cornwall during the First World War. The horrors of that war are at first a distant threat. But eventually the reality of the bestial slaughter overshadows all the lives of the young women at the heart of the book. The novel centres on Clare Coyne, her cousin Hannah and friend Peggy, young women growing up in a rural community dominated by ties of family and duty. But the country villages of Cornwall, including the Zennor of the title, are slowly but irrevocably affected by the encroaching war. Firstly, the war brings strangers to Zennor, among them DH Lawrence and his German wife, Frieda. Dunmore succeeds in capturing many of their well documented characteristics: Frieda's unconventional power and deep sadness at the loss of her children (who she had left behind when she ran away from respectability to be with Lawrence); his vitality and surprising domesticity. Through their characters, Dunmore is able to describe the social tensions and gross hypocrisy of wartime society beyond rural Cornwall:
'Lords and ministers look eastwards to Russia, where revolution is breaking like a wave on the heels of hunger and war. The menu at the Ritz still offers five courses larded with cream. And those who can afford it must eat up all the caviar, because the poor would never swallow those clotted, salty, unfamiliar globules. To eat caviar is to perform a service to one's country.'
Lawrence and Frieda also provide an alternative set of values to those of submission to narrow expectations, family loyalty and obedience to the church. It is through Lawrence that Clare learns to develop beyond simply harnessing her artistic talent to reproducing endless botany studies for her father. Lawrence encourages Clare to look at the world, to strive for more than neatness and accuracy in her watercolours of flowers, and attempt to draw the strength and beauty of what is within.
As the war progresses, attitudes harden and the bigotry of the local people towards the outsiders becomes harder to bear. The hypocrisy of the villagers is exposed; they rig the draft boards to protect their own loved ones, then express their great patriotism by crying at Red Cross concerts and harassing and persecuting the Lawrences.
The war also means that young men disappear, some return changed forever with physical or mental scars, some never come back at all. The lucky ones desert and disappear. The urgency of enforced separations erodes tradition and social codes. At the end of the novel there is no great triumph of political action or great principle, but there is the personal triumph of remaining untainted by the madness of war, and of staying true to love and friendship.
Dunmore's second novel, Burning Bright, is set in the shady underworld of contemporary Manchester and London. It is a world where the old have to fight for survival but, above all, it is a world of sexual exploitation, where emotional ties can lead young women into lives of prostitution. The novel centres on Nadine, overlooked by her preoccupied parents, desperate for affection, and Enid, an indomitable old woman who lives half her life in the past, reliving her own story of forbidden love. Their stories become interwoven. Nadine is naive and dependent on pimps and dealers. Enid is haunted by the woman she once loved, and the bitter jealousy and murder which dramatically ended their affair. The two women are unknowingly linked by a politician who is rich and powerful and yet permanently scarred by his sexually repressive upbringing. Despite its focus on the ruthless and sometimes violent underworld, this manages to be a moving and optimistic novel about the strength of personal integrity.
Dunmore's third novel, A Spell for Winter, has few characters and a claustrophobic focus on one isolated house at the turn of the century. Catherine is brought up in the shadow of her absent mother, who ran away to freedom, the mental illness of her father and the constant disapproval of her grandfather.
As Catherine grows up, her intense relationship with her only sibling, her brother, develops into a passionate love affair which binds Catherine to endure her fate. She experiences the pain of abortion, betrayal and murder before she breaks the spell that binds her to the house and its lonely winter landscapes. The outbreak of the First World War is again the catalyst that sets in progress events which transform Catherine's world. The power of this novel comes from the expression of complex emotions in descriptions of the physical world.
Helen Dunmore writes about women caught between passionate love and social repression, who have to choose between following real feelings whatever the consequences and accepting emotions which are corrupted by greed, manipulation or fear. Her novels expose how social hierarchies and restrictions invade the most intimate parts of our lives, and how, on a personal level, women resist.
Helen Dunmore's latest novel, Talking to the Dead, is now available, Penguin £6.99