The Monkey Puzzle Tree

The Monkey Puzzle Tree by Sonia Tilson. The war time childhood scenes in this novel, in particular when the young girl goes to boarding school with her haunting memories of what happened at the age of six, I found extremely convincing and enthralling. After a lifetime of spotty relationships, when she finds herself in not fully intended confrontation with the molester, the story is one that not many readers will put down until the end, in my opinion.

I've been happily reading this series and loving the wonderful writing, but In The Shade of the Monkey Puzzle Tree, I failed to connect with the main character. Also there simply wasn't enough struggle for me in Shade. It just felt more lightweight than the previous.I know this author can better develop characters and write more in depth storylines, and will continue reading her book. I recommend The Illegal Gardener.

Bearing in mind that Sonia Tilson's background seems very similar to that of her heroine Gillian in 'The Monkey Puzzle Tree', I wonder whether this novel is autobiographical. This would explain the mood of enormous bitterness and anger that dominates the book, and the fact that everyone seems to be against the heroine. (All credit to Tilson, if this book is based on reality, for her bravery in writing it and for what she's made of her life, of course.)'The Monkey Puzzle Tree' opens with 55-year-old Gillian returning from Canada to Swansea to visit her dying mother. We gather almost at once that their relationship is very bad, that Gillian's mother constantly tries to undermine her, and that Gillian is an unhappy woman. The reason for the unhappiness we learn very soon. As a small child, Gillian was evacuated with her brother Tommy during World War II. For a few months, as their grandmother was recovering from an operation, they lived in the doctor's house in the village of Maenordy. There, the doctor's teenage son sexually abused six-year-old Gillian, who was too ashamed to tell anyone. And the misery of this incident has dominated her life ever since, ruined her relationship with her mother, and made her the depressed middle-aged woman that she is.But has it, or is Gillian's misery partly due to the myriad other things that have gone wrong in her life? For certainly, few middle-class reasonably comfortably-off girls can have had such a hard time of it. Gillian's relationship with her mother Iris was already bad before her evacuation - in the very first of the World War II flashbacks we read about Iris telling Gillian not to be a baby or cry about being evacuated. And after the evacuation, nothing appears to go right for Gillian either - in ways totally unrelated to her time at Maenordy. Her best friend Vanna stops speaking to her when Gillian passes the Eleven Plus and she (due to a domestic abuse incident at home) doesn't. Although she could have gone to grammar school in Swansea, Gillian's parents pack her off to a horrible girls' boarding school, where one of her co-pupils dies of grief and a heart condition within the first term (before Gillian's had a chance to really be kind to her). Her parents never seem glad when she comes home for holidays. At Swansea University she has a disastrous relationship with a Welsh activist student called Llewellyn, and gets drooled over by one of her lecturers. She then decamps to Canada where she falls in love with a brutal painter who hits her, forces her to live in the middle of nowhere and murders her dog; the relationship leaves her pregnant, and she decides to marry Russ, a man who de-ices helicopters and turns out, to paraphrase Simon Gray's Butley, to be 'the most boring man in Ottawa'. He refuses to let her have friends, socialize or take holidays, and is a bad father to Gillian's son Bryn, who on one occasion he uses as a shield against a flying football in the park. Eventually Gillian sees sense and leaves him - but even then, with a kind bookshop owner (complete with giant cat) wooing her and an interesting job teaching English, her hopes for a peaceful life are shattered by her mother's illness. Can she ever recover? And is the sexual abuse at the heart of her anguish?And that, for me, was the problem with 'The Monkey Puzzle Tree' - Tilson went so over the top with heaping misery upon Gillian, of all different kinds, that one was never sure. And because there was little real sense of Gillian's inner life one was never sure either how much the sexual abuse was part of her conscious existence and how it had affected her. It certainly didn't seem to have made her frigid, like a lot of abuse victims, or frightened of men. Nor did it make her quiet and cowed - indeed her behaviour at boarding school implied an almost aggressive self-confidence, and her humility with Doug the artist seemed more to do with a toxic relationship than with a sense she didn't deserve good treatment per se. Nor did Tilson make it clear if Gillian's relationship with her mother was destroyed by what happened at Maenordy, or whether it was all down to Gillian's mother's troubled relationships and fatal decision to stay with Gillian's father (and in that case, wouldn't she have blamed Gillian's brother more than Gillian?). Overall, it seemed that mother and daughter hadn't ever been close, rather than - as the book's blurb implied - having a close relationship that was destroyed by Gillian's transformation after her abuse. One felt that Gillian's 'damaged' personality was as much the result of a wildly dysfunctional and coldly unloving home as to do with what happened with Angus the doctor's son.Moreover, because Tilson's so busy cramming as much misery as possible into Gillian's life, the whole 'sexual abuse' strand of the plot is forgotten for long periods. Gillian rarely if ever thinks as things go wrong 'if I hadn't been interfered with as a six-year-old evacuee this would never have happened' - indeed she doesn't appear to think much about Maenordy at all until her return to Wales in her fifties. And when Tilson does come back to the story of Angus, and Gillian determines to get revenge, it all feels a bit rapid and over the top. Why, for example, is Gladys, who Gillian was never close to, suddenly so prepared to chat to Gillian about what happened to her, and be so candid? And SPOILER ALERT why does Angus happily confess everything to Gillian, and, likewise, his daughter-in-law immediately pick up on what Gillian has said about Angus and respond with 'oh yes, that makes sense, I've worried about Angus and our daughter' when she's seemingly showed no signs of anxiety before? In the end, it all felt a bit too slick and rushed, as did what happened to Tom and Vanna - whereas other elements of the plot felt maddeningly unfinished: Gillian never resolved her relationship with her mother, for example, and we never got any hint of what might happen to her and Simon after she left Wales.I suppose in the end my problem with the book was that it was so uniformly depressing, and that the characters seemed to have so little self-knowledge. Every new chapter I found myself bracing myself for another horrible thing to happen, and for Gillian to have not learnt anything more about herself or tried to get help. Even the end didn't really resolve things that well. And I didn't find Gillian as sympathetic as I think I was meant to - partly as she never seemed to stop and reflect about why her life was going so disastrously and what might change things. The other characters were somewhat thinly depicted, either 'really evil', 'victims' or 'sympathetic friends', which added to the melancholy air.On the other hand, I have to say that the book is certainly memorable and powerful, and there are some passages of great beauty, such as Gillian's love for her chapel-going grandmother, her addiction to 'Jane Eyre' and other novels at boarding school, her eagerness to live life to the full in Swansea, the account of her mother's doomed relationship with the dashing Ieuan, and her trips to Simon's bookshop in Ottawa. But they were brief episodes of sunshine in a book that is largely characterized for me by a gray, ominous atmosphere.I would be interested, though, due to the quality of some of the writing, to see what sort of book Tilson turned out if she wrote on a different subject. In the end, I think that she is a very talented writer - but this book just wasn't for me.

I bought this book on recommendation from a friend.Although dark story, I enjoyed the read. In my humble opinion the book is well written and you want to find out what happens.Hope there is another story to come!..Jenny, selimiye.

I enjoyed The monkey Puzzle Tree. It is written with pace, and I kept wanting to read the next page, and then the next chapter, to find out what happens. When I did put it down I found myself reflecting on the story long afterwards. Well done! A great book to read.

This fictive account of a wartime childhood in Wales and an afterlife in Canada. It is lively written and evokes a sometimes dark picture. Not a bad first novel for an octogenerian !