Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy

Earlier this year, I was feeling a little underwhelmed by much of the new fiction I had been reading. There were of course some notable exceptions – books such as Kathryn Scanlan’s remarkable novella Kick the Latch and Benjamin Wood’s underrated The Young Accomplice, to name just two. But other well-reviewed novels left me hoping for more. No such worries with Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor, a novel so authentic, intense and visceral it feels like this year’s My Phantoms – the lack of a Booker longlisting only adding to this view.

We are in the early months of motherhood here, an unrelenting fug of exhausting, mindless days and fraught, sleep-deprived nights. The novel is conveyed through an extraordinary monologue as the mother, Soldier, addresses her four-year-old son, Sailor, almost in the form of a confessional. (I couldn’t help but be reminded of the brilliant Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes here.) What Kilroy does so brilliantly is to immerse the reader in Soldier’s life as a new mother, laying bare her struggles with parenting and hopes for the future while peppering these revelations with flashes of dark humour. It’s a cutting, razor-sharp wit born out of desperation, raw with the pain of frustration from the challenges she’s been facing.

In short, Soldier’s life has become so small, a world of stupid, meaningless ‘stuff’ from changing nappies and peeling veg to trying to manage the supermarket shop with a cranky baby in tow. A lethal combination of sleep deprivation and a lack of mental stimulation has kicked in, leaving Soldier lonely, exhausted and lost, subsumed with resentment for the person she has been forced to become – a person she doesn’t like or recognise, a distortion of her former self.

Soldier’s husband – whose work is clearly more important than the trivial business of childrearing – comes home from work increasingly late, shirking all responsibilities for parenting apart from relishing in the beauty of his baby by proclaiming, ‘How’s my little man?’. Meanwhile, the relentless minutiae of motherhood has erased Soldier’s sense of self, dominating her life to the detriment of her mental health.

‘Bye bye, Dadda,’ I said on your behalf, waving your little hand. Your father kissed us both before closing the door, a guillotine severing me from my world. Which is not to say that your father was my world, but that he was free to roam in my world, which we should now call his world, or perhaps the world, an adult place from which I’d been banished. Now I lived in your world. It was small. (p. 40)

Getting a baby fed, cleaned, dressed and ready to leave the house is a major strategic operation, especially when they pull off their socks more quickly than you can put them on! There are several painful scenes involving tantrums in the supermarket, rows between Soldier and her husband in IKEA or in the car, and tussles over toys at the dreaded Mother and Toddler Group – itself a microcosm of competitive middle-class society. Nevertheless, Kilroy invests these set pieces with a rare combination of authenticity, honesty and pitch-black comedy. The line between just-about-coping and not-coping-at-all is desperately thin.

‘You should bring him to that,’ concluded the Child Developmental Specialist [Soldier’s husband]. ‘Socialise him,’ he added, a word he had picked up from me.

I had been talking about socialising you at the Baby and Toddler group for weeks although now apparently it was his idea. Problem was I couldn’t get out of the house on time. It was difficult to explain the obstacles to my husband because they weren’t obstacles he recognised. They weren’t obstacles I’d recognise before having you, the whole, three-steps-forwards, two-steps-back racket. Since becoming mobile, you could undo faster than I could do. (pp. 37–38)

Meanwhile, her husband’s life has not changed one iota. In fact, if anything, his quality of life has improved. He comes home to a clean house, is served dinner each night and has all the time in the world for his gym training. The only thing he has little appetite for is helping with the childcare.

While Soldier’s husband is always there in some capacity to see when things are going wrong, he never seems able to offer any support or practical help. And if Soldier does give him something simple to do, such as the bedtime routine or a nappy change, he seems to mess it up, meaning Soldier must intervene herself. Consequently, the man of the house loses face and complains of being undermined by his wife. It’s a no-win situation for Soldier, however she plays it.

Instead, the husband chimes in by stating the bleeding obvious, pointing out where his wife is going wrong. The trouble is, she knows this herself, but the practical solutions are easier said than done. It’s perfectly simple for him to pass judgement on his wife’s approach to parenting — an approach he often finds wanting — but much harder to deliver excellent care in practice, especially when a toddler is flexing his free will.

‘I don’t understand why you didn’t bring him to the doctor, that’s all.’ He [Soldier’s husband] used to do that all the time, swoop in like the senior consultant to pass judgement on his junior doctor, whom he always found wanting.

‘Look, if the level of care I am giving our son is unsatisfactory, feel free to step in. Feel free to do a whole ten minutes of parenting. Don’t let me stop you.’

By this point, we were both standing over your sleeping body in the cot. Your father, the Professor of Paediatrics, was down on his hunkers examining the bump in relief. (p. 72)

Moreover, Soldier is acutely aware that her youth is ebbing away with motherhood set to dictate her life for the next 12 to 15 years. While standing in the playground, she realises that her ‘time on the swing’ has come and gone; other, younger girls are flying now, embracing life with all its delights and opportunities. No more smart clothes and high heels for Soldier; instead, she must schlep around the kitchen in her far-from-glamorous slippers.

Something else Kilroy does so effectively here is to capture the seemingly continual tension between overwhelming frustration/annoyance with your child and the inherent desire to protect them from harm to the point of being willing to kill others – or even yourself! – to ward off significant threats. For instance, the sheer panic of losing a child in the supermarket is brilliantly conveyed – an experience every parent dreads when temporarily distracted.

There is nothing a mother would not do to protect her child from harm. She would kill others for him, she would kill her husband, she would kill herself. (p. 18)

There are other hazards and near-misses too: the ultra-sharp knife that drops on the kitchen floor while Sailor plays with his toys; the moving swing that narrowly misses his head while playing in the park; the buggy that rolls into the road as Soldier battles with an umbrella. (Naturally, the fancy chopping knife is part of an expensive set purchased by Soldier’s husband – ‘man toys’ the man of the house has never used because his wife does all the cooking!)

Then, one day, Soldier is thrown a lifeline when she bumps into an old friend in the park. He’s now a stay-at-home dad with three beautiful children – all friendly and relatively well-behaved. Suddenly, she can have adult conversations with someone who understands the myriad of challenges involved in parenting – and, thank goodness, someone who seems to have got the whole childcare thing down pat. Amazing!

As the children’s play dates in the park continue, this man encourages Soldier, helping her re-establish certain elements of the person she was before, boosting her confidence and self-worth in ways she so desperately needs. It’s a hopeful turning point in this emotional roller-coaster of a read.

Throughout the novel, Kilroy only shows us the mother’s view of these situations; we never hear from the father directly, only Soldier’s take on his behaviour; consequently, one might query the narrator’s reliability. But as other reviewers have mentioned, that’s almost beside the point. To Soldier, this experience is real; it feels visceral and authentic. I’ve never experienced motherhood first-hand, but from everything I’ve seen through the experiences of friends and family, Soldier’s emotions are utterly relatable. An outstanding powerhouse of a novel, easily one of my books of the year.

Soldier Sailor is published by Faber & Faber; my thanks to the Independent Alliance and the publisher for kindly providing a reading copy.