The Doctor’s Wife – Brian Moore (1976)

The #1976club starts today, I have come to thoroughly enjoy these club reads hosted by Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuckinabook and 1976 is one of the later years that have been selected. There were a good selection of titles to pick from including lots of books I have read before and was quite tempted to re-read. In the end I decided to go for two new reads – my second 1976 title will be reviewed later this week.

It is especially pleasing that Brian Moore’s The Doctor’s Wife fitted into this reading week, as 2021 is the centenary of Brian Moore’s birth and Cathy at 746 books has been celebrating his life and work all year. I first read Brian Moore in 2019, when I read his 1955 novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, maybe the best known of his novels these days. Earlier this year I read Lies of Silence and The Feast of Lupercal as part of the centenary read-a-long hosted by Cathy – remembering suddenly that my dad had been a big fan of Brian Moore’s novels. There are themes present in The Doctor’s Wife that I certainly recognised from those other novels. Despite, the fact that the majority of this novel is set in France, the Troubles in Northern Ireland loom large. Yet, in this novel Moore also examines human relationships, especially within marriage with great insight and understanding.

Sheila Redden, a thirty-seven year old Doctor’s Wife from Northern Ireland, arranged to stay overnight in Paris with a friend Peg, before continuing her journey the following day to Villefranche where she would be joined by her husband. The same room, in the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon sixteen years earlier.

“What about those men you read about in newspaper stories who walk out of their homes saying they are going down to the corner to buy cigarettes and are never heard from again? This is Paris. I am here. What if I never go back?”

Four weeks later, Sheila is nowhere to be found, and her brother; Owen Deane another doctor, has followed her to Paris to try and discover what happened and where she is.

When she arrived in Paris Sheila knew that her husband Kevin was rather less keen on this holiday than she was, in fact he would probably have rather stayed at home. She was looking forward to catching up with Peg, and seeing a bit of Paris again on her own. She has no idea that a chance introduction will see her spending her holiday with an American man eleven years her junior. Tom Lowry is attractive and charismatic and instantly attracted to Sheila, he is nothing like her husband. Sheila is flattered by Tom’s attention, but leaves Paris as planned for Villefranche and the hotel where she is due to meet her husband. Tom follows, and Kevin doesn’t arrive – held up by work at home, he promises to try and get away in a few days, of course he never does.

“She looked back now at this eager stranger, this American boy, smiling at her, sipping wine. ‘I don’t know,’ she said ‘some people never want to go outside the place they were born in. And others seem to want to run away from the day they’re old enough to walk.’

‘And which are you?’

‘A runaway.’

‘But you didn’t leave, did you?’”

The inevitable happens, and Sheila embarks on a passionate affair with Tom. There are a few rather explicit sex scenes which may not be for everyone, but it’s clear that despite the differences in their ages, it is Sheila for who all this is new, a million miles from her sexual experiences with her husband. This a kind of awakening for Sheila – as if she is suddenly becoming the woman she always should have been.

“How did I get so bogged down in ordinariness that even this once I couldn’t do the spontaneous thing, the thing I really wanted to do. The future is forbidden to no one. Unless we forbid it ourselves.”

Alongside the story of Sheila and Tom, there are flashbacks to the life Sheila had in Northern Ireland her memories of the troubles, which have affected her greatly, and her narrow stifling marriage to Kevin. She also has a fifteen year old son, but seems able to tell herself that he doesn’t really need her anymore, he will be off her hands in a few years anyway. It’s rather sad, that while Sheila is contemplating never returning to her life in Northern Ireland, it is her teenage son who seems to be considered the least.

On the one hand there seems to be no judgement from Moore on the behaviour of his characters, however it is interesting that throughout the novel, he mainly refers to Sheila as Mrs Redden – driving a point home, I thought. The reader remains in little doubt that Kevin Redden is not the man Sheila should be spending her life with, there is a very unpleasant scene between them, which I don’t want to discuss here, because others may be reading this book this week. Sheila has to make some big decisions about her future, Tom is pressing her to go to America with him, Kevin insists she should go home. When Owen Deane arrives in Paris no one seems to know where Sheila is.

A novel about a woman having an affair with a younger man, and making seismic decisions about her life, is nothing new. Yet, Moore brings something else to this age old story. He also makes it fantastically compelling.