Cuckoo

by Wendy Perriam

Frances is on a fertility drug and sizing up the milkman. Charles is struggling between shocked disapproval and guilty desire for his own illegitimate daughter – a fifteen-year-old secret who arrives and takes over the nest. Their sterile and rule-ridden marriage (where even sex requires timetable and rule-book) begins to fall apart. In desperation, Frances seeks an escape-route, in a wild attempt to change the cold climate of her life.

In this tragic-comic study of relationships in conflict, Perriam reflects on freedom in all its different aspects, ranging motherhood against emancipation, teenage rebellion against middle-aged repression, and sexual abandonment against puritan restraint. She also makes us laugh. Cuckoo is extremely funny, though in Perriam’s work we are often laughing at ourselves and the sad lunacy of the way we run our lives. By the end of this explosive novel, the cuckoos – and the cuckolds – are clearly coming home to roost.

‘Devilishly entertaining and surprisingly touching’ Sunday Express

‘Perriam is a writer of authority and skill, with a wicked ear for conversational quirks’ Sunday Times

380 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column.

Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

My second by Perriam, after The Stillness The Dancing, and I’ve amassed quite a pile for afterwards. Frances Parry Jones, in her early thirties, is desperate for a baby but her husband, Charles, doesn’t seem fussed. He goes along with fertility treatment but remains aloof like the posh snob Perriam depicts him to be – the opening line is “Typical of Charles to decant his sperm sample into a Fortnum and Mason’s jar.” Their comfortable home in Richmond is cut off from the messy reality of life, as represented by Frances’s friend Viv and her brood.

Frances soon learns why Charles is unenthusiastic about having children: he already has one, a sullen teenager named Magda who lived with her mother in Hungary but has just arrived in London, “a greedy little cuckoo, commandeering the nest.” Though tempted to accept Magda as a replacement child, Frances just can’t manage it. However, they do find common ground through their japes with Ned, a free spirit Frances meets during her brief time as a taxi driver, and Frances starts to imagine how her life could be different. The portraits and sex scenes alike were a little grotesque here. I had to skim a lot to get through it. Here’s hoping for a better experience with the next one.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Jim Dooley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book really surprised me. I was looking for some light summer soap opera reading with more than a hint of sauciness. Yes, I found all of that...and I also found a very literate piece with well-drawn characters, and loaded with twists that didn't strain credibility.

The author's comfort with descriptive language was a particular joy. I'm paraphrasing here, but descriptions such as "The pan was moving under her nose with Ned attached to the handle" were so much more fun to savor than the expected "Ned moved the pan under her nose." There were many times that I found myself smiling at the writer's turn of phrase.

I suppose that I should mention that this would also be considered a mild entry in the erotica genre. The main difference I saw was that the story didn't revolve around the sexual acts, and vulgar descriptions were never used. (Those can also be fun, but this writer is going for a different form of mental stimulation.)

A central theme is self-identity...and how that doesn't completely define a person. There are characters who are obsessed with image, others who only live for the moment, and still others who seem completely lost. All of them are enduring, and quite a few are unraveling. Those who can eventually let go of preconceptions have hope. Those who can't are bound for their fate.

The writer in me was constantly thinking of how the various story twists would resolve...and I was almost always wrong. The good thing was that it did not seem as if the author was playing with me...one of those "He'll never think of this one" things...but, centered on the choices these characters would actually make. An omniscient writer can guide us to an ending. People who are living these things are too involved to make such distinctions.

When I selected this title, I saw that Wendy Perriam had other books to her credit. I will definitely want to take a look at those. In the meantime, I can recommend CUCKOO as one of those undiscovered summer reading gems.