Review by Graham Johnstone
Una’s 2015 debut Becoming Unbecoming was widely praised, translated into multiple languages, and produced for the theatre. The pseudonymous author drew on personal experience growing up in the shadow of serial killer the Yorkshire Ripper. The result fused personal and public history, so powerfully as to be hard to follow. For 2021’s Eve, Una turns from the traumas of a remembered past to an imagined future.
Una’s visual communication was already strong, but in the opening pages of Eve, the art shifts from paint to pencil, and from landscape to life drawing, demonstrating greater range and refinement. In one scene, she convincingly captures gangly pre-teens in swimsuits, before evoking Eve and new friend Ruby’s connection beyond the articulation of either. Sometimes the higher resolution proves distracting or repetitive, yet it needs to carry details, like skin tones, that will become significant in this angry little Britain. Graffitied walls, and landscapes scribed with cartographic notations, are amongst many striking images. So the art is stronger, but Una’s challenge here is the content.
Eve has story elements in common with the earlier book, notably a girl growing up in Yorkshire. However, the setting flips from troubled past to troubling future, so shifting mode from memoir to fiction. The politics also flip – from gender, to class and race. Introductory texts sketch a sadly familiar 21st Century Britain, including populist rabble-rousing, scapegoating of ‘immigrants’, climate change denial, and criminalisation of activists. An authoritarian government is pressuring schools to comply, or be defunded in favour of uniformed youth organisation ‘The Might’. For two families in rural Yorkshire, these events grow from distant worry to consuming reality, so framing the political story in more personal ones.
However, the political events feel too removed from these lives, experienced indirectly through news reports, journal entries, and lengthy dialogues. Ensconced in their rural haven, the troubles feel too long a distant worry, then too suddenly an immediate danger. New realities manifest in fascinating details, like a straw that filters pond water, and Eve’s tote-bag turned hammock. Other times, the story-world doesn’t convince. A young lesbian’s pregnancy, is attributed to a ‘need to repopulate’, previously unmentioned. There’s a mouthpiece for disenfranchised white people, in the red-headed Ruby, but this jars with her relationship with mixed race Eve, and also emerges very late in the book. The underlying politics are as convincing as they are disturbing, but could have been woven deeper through the characters and their lives.
Events creating cause and effect for characters could also have been more tightly planned. Eve’s rediscovery of Ruby, offers a charming love-amongst-the-ruins interlude, yet highlights plot weaknesses. Eve searching for Ruby would have fuelled a quest through the (otherwise hardly seen) political carnage. However, Eve leaves home without clear cause, and the two girls simply chance upon each other in a remote location. This loses the tension of a search, and consequent satisfaction of their reunion. After the subtly implied swimming pool courtship, there’s little hint of Eve’s orientation. That could have been built up to with, say, an abortive romance with (male confidant) Si. Similarly, there’s little hint of Si’s chosen path going wrong, until its sudden final crisis. That brings him to the same remote camp, to be third wheel – that’s dramatically sound, but weakened by relying on coincidence.
Eve could have been stronger for more planning and plotting. However that’s reasonably offset by the urgency of Una’s powerful warning about this all too believable future for Britain. It’s another important book that deserves to be widely read anywhere brewing an authoritarian regime.
