'Practice' by Rosalind Brown

I usually tend to steer clear of plot-light, contemporary novels and particularly those which are likened in their cover blurbs to the work of Virginia Woolf. I am often impressed by books of this type and admire the writing, but just increasingly find that I would prefer to spend the limited leisure time I have left in life to reading novels which give me more personal enjoyment and satisfaction than these tend to. I did, however, pick this one up and really enjoyed it very much. It is innovative and very bold.

The narrative largely focuses on a single day in the life of a final year English undergraduate studying at Oxford University about fifteen years ago, and I would think is highly autobiographical. The central character is called Annabel, and the novel is wholly focused on her thoughts and activities as she tries through the course of a Sunday in January to work on an essay about some of William Shakespeare’s sonnets.

I was not so sure about why this novel is called ‘Practice’. I guess it I because Annabel is practicing being a functioning adult while she is at university, coming across experiences and challenges for the first time. But I think ‘procrastination’ might have been a more appropriate title in many ways, because at its heart the book is about the ways that other people, and also our own bodily requirements and desires continually prevent us from concentrating on our work as we often want to.

Throughout her day Annabel fantasises about the lives of two young men living in the past, one of whom she calls ‘The Scholar’ and the other ‘The Seducer’. This daydream mirrors what happens to her, stuff happening pretty continually that serves to tempt her away from the scholarship she really wants to concentrate on.

Most of the distractions are caused by her own body - its needs and its appetites. She describes in great detail everything that Annabel eats and drinks during the day and also the toiletry consequences of all this digestion. She takes exercise, going out for two walks around Oxford as her day proceeds and also practices yoga. There is a lovely passage where she tries to meditate but finds it impossible to empty her mind of practical thoughts for long enough to do it properly.

Her mind also drifts frequently to thoughts of a sexual nature, the issue of whether or not her boyfriend is to be permitted to visit her the following weekend occupying her. She wants to sleep with him very much, but fears that seeing him for a whole three days will take her away from study. She ums and ahs before finally making her decision at the end of the novel, giving the reader a little slither of plot to keep the pages turning.

I enjoyed trying to work out from the various topographical hints she gives us which Oxford college Annabel is studying at – not something that is ever made clear. It could, of course, be an imagined college, but I think not. She mentions various street names that are very real and also at one point writes about Annabel hearing the bells of Merton ringing prior to evensong. As I was reading I found myself hoping that the college was Oriel as that is where I was an undergraduate many years earlier than the time at which this is set. But later she makes reference to a garden and turning right at the chapel door in order to reach Hall. So I thought that Annabel's college must in fact be Corpus Christi.

The book is remarkably candid and honest about bodily function. Rosalind Brown writes with astonishing skill and beauty about very intimate matters, going to places that even Annie Ernaux at her very frankest would not dare go. The passage on pages 180 and 181 in my paperback edition is completely extraordinary in this respect; brilliantly done and not really quotable here. But others are. There is one section where Annabel’s mind wanders to thoughts about the different types of orgasms she experiences when pleasuring herself. It culminates as follows:

The best and strangest ones are those infused from the beginning with a feeling of deliciousness. Often in the middle of the day like this, when she is meant to be doing something else. Spending some time preparing to take herself across the room to lie down on the bed, the slowly revolving knowledge of yes that’s what we’re going to do, she feels it taking shape, she and a dirty gleeful part of her brain snuggle together and watch, satisfied with her naughtiness. She might be wet long before anything begins officially. These ones just involved following the scent of it in her mind, there is no leading or selecting or deciding. These are the things she will do to herself in this state. And then when she’s come it’s like a chunk of glacier collapsing into the sea, with vertigo and shockwaves and catastrophic melting. Then everything very still and grey: she has reached the bottom of her own barrel.

Not quite what one is generally accustomed to reading in a work of literary fiction, and so so difficult to do well.

Most of the book, however, is really very serious. Aside from a lot of interesting musing on Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is about the whole business of balancing the need to devote time to serious work with all the other distractions of life.

It becomes clear towards the end that events of a pretty dire nature have been going on in a nearby room all the time that Annabel has been working away on her essay, and that she has been too absorbed in her work to be aware of them. And throughout she is continually having to work out how to please both her boyfriend – which she really wants to do – while also achieving her own academic ambitions:

In less than four months she will have to bring the whole of her routine and quietness to bear on her Finals. This is what Rich cannot quite comprehend: that she doesn’t have time to be infatuated with him. He agrees with her making work a priority right up to the point where he doesn’t get to see her: he cannot follow her across the last leap, he cannot enter into the vision of it: where she is fully suspended in her work like a crystal in a glass of water, absolutely silent and solitary.

Moreover, Annabel is not only studying for her own satisfaction. There is also a competitive streak in her. She is concerned about how her fellow undergraduates are getting on with their essays too, and she is keen to do well in comparison. Her insecurities and uncertainties are all explored very subtly and realistically.

This really is a splendid little novel. Funny and serious, original and memorable, very personal, engaging and thought-provoking.