#BlogTour ‘The Retreat’ by Alison Moore

About the book…

Since childhood, Sandra Peters has been fascinated by the small, private island of Lieloh, home to the reclusive silent-film star Valerie Swanson.

Having dreamed of going to art college, Sandra is now in her forties and working as a receptionist, but she still harbours artistic ambitions. When she sees an advert for a two-week artists’ retreat on Lieloh, Sandra sets out on what might be a life-changing journey.

My thanks to Helen Richardson for inviting me to read and review, ‘The Retreat’ by Alison Moore which is published by Salt on November 15th in e-book and paperback formats.

This is a dark and beguiling novel which is rich in imagery and characterisation, undercut with a sense of menace and creeping horror.

What happens when you get to the place of which you have dreamed for so long, only to find it is not the escape you wanted, or needed it to be?

On the one hand you have the narrative of Sandra, who has had ambitions of going to the island of Lieloh for so long, finally getting there as part of an artists retreat. Only her artistic ambition and thoughts of dedicating this specified time away from her family is explored through her increasingly fraught encounters with her fellow artistes.

She spends the majority of the time on the island as if she was a ghost, her very existence causing problems to all around her-when another woman named Sandra arrives, she doesn’t  even own her own name!
She becomes the second best Sandra!

Being vegetarian is an inconvenience for the others, who undermine her personal preferences in a million tiny acts of micro aggressions, she is systematically cut out and cut off from them, and even when she tries to share her paintings, or tries to impose some sort of order on the house, she becomes even more isolated.

The notion of retreat, appears to me to be both a personal and military term-you strategically pull back your forces in order to regroup, re-think and strategize how to move forward. And , in a sense, this is what Sandra is looking for. She wants to go back to that childhood feeling of not being responsible, having something to aim for (staying on Lieloh) and not being a wife, mother or any other noun. She wants to find herself but, when she removes all the constraints on herself as an artist, will she be able to connect with what she has always thought that life, and circumstance has kept her away from?

And , in the cruellest trick of all, Sandra has a revelation which takes the nature of retreat and stamps a muddy boot print on it.

Also narrating the novel, is writer Carol, someone who has only ever written short stories and who has dreams of writing a fantasy series. She is taken with the image of Lieloh after reading that it was the last place where silver screen film star Valerie Swanson spent her last days. Inspired by the film makers who went there to film one of her short stories, she decamps for isolation and inspiration, hopeful for a muse.

Her occupation of the house runs parallel with Sandra’s and I admit to feeling confused for a while, until I got it and wow, when that penny drops you feel like the rug has been pulled out from under you.

The smoke and mirrors tricks which Alison Moore employs are so brilliantly executed that you don’t even mind.

The women searching for retreat find one, but is it what they think they wanted, or needed?

And the irony of a silent movie film star, hamstrung by the invention of the ‘talkies’ because her voice did not come across well , is just staggering. The silencing of the voice of these three women, as Valerie stalks the backstage of this novel so I consider her a narrator, has powerful things to say on the taking away of female voices. They are variously told their voices are hideous, irrelevant, or not strong enough.

I also wonder if the island of Lieloh was deliberately named- ‘Lie-LOW’- and tied in with the nature of retreat. After all, what does a retreat become if you want to escape but bring all your issues with you?

Sandra spends the majority of the story trying to send a letter home to the family she so desperately wanted time away from, Carol is trying to access her novel which she is sure, if she just gets enough inspiration is lurking in her creative heart and Valerie, she walks behind the lines of the tale as a Carter-esque creation.

Angela Carter, creator and writer of dark and twisted feminist leaning tales, is another influence on this story, she haunts the narration , being read by those who just don’t seem to ‘get’ her, they are reading her as if another tick on their list of things to appear bohemian and ‘with it’. Carol’s haunting experience is steeped in gothic intensity, and what kept coming to mind, was the notion of keys and locks, and Carter’s re-working of my personal favourite fairy tale, Bluebeard.

What if, when you find the key, you open the door, but can never remove the stain which results from that action?

A powerful tale of the voice of women and that which we allow to silence it, ‘The Retreat’ is a brilliant novel which I feel incredibly privileged to have read. Intense, lyrical and haunted, I loved it.

About the author…

Born in Manchester in 1971, Alison Moore lives next but one to a sheep field in a village on the Leicestershire-Nottinghamshire border, with her husband Dan and son Arthur.

She is a member of Nottingham Writers’ Studio and an honorary lecturer in the School of English at Nottingham University.

In 2012 her novel ‘The Lighthouse’, the unsettling tale of a middle-aged man who embarks on a contemplative German walking holiday after the break-up of his marriage – only to find himself more alienated than ever, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.

Twitter @RichardsonHelen @SaltPublishing