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Listeners
What drives you to be a Samaritan? Is it the need to help others, or are you responding to a damaged part of yourself? The Listeners follows the stories of those in need, and those that answer their calls. Billie, drinking away her loneliness, dials the Samaritan number expecting little from a bunch of 'do-gooders'. Tim, lost and desperate, calls in a frantic plea for help. Jackie, a young-man with learning difficulties, phones just to hear a friendly voice. For all of the callers, the most vital thing is to hear that they are cared for, and that they are not alone. The importance of this resonates with each of them in different ways. But can you really save someone from themselves? This is something that Victoria, Paul, and Sarah – all Samaritans with very different reasons for wanting to help – will have to find out the hard way.
In The Listeners, first published in 1970, Monica Dickens draws from her own experience as a Samaritan, creating a heart-warming look at the realities of hardship, and salvation.
In The Listeners, first published in 1970, Monica Dickens draws from her own experience as a Samaritan, creating a heart-warming look at the realities of hardship, and salvation.
- GenresFiction
MP3 CD
First published April 13, 1970
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About the author
Monica Dickens
95 books131 followersFrom the publisher: MONICA DICKENS, born in 1915, was brought up in London and was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Her mother's German origins and her Catholicism gave her the detached eye of an outsider; at St Paul's Girls' School she was under occupied and rebellious. After drama school she was a debutante before working as a cook. One Pair of Hands (1939), her first book, described life in the kitchens of Kensington. It was the first of a group of semi autobiographies of which Mariana (1940), technically a novel, was one. 'My aim is to entertain rather than instruct,' she wrote. 'I want readers to recognise life in my books.' In 1951 Monica Dickens married a US naval officer, Roy Stratton, moved to America and adopted two daughters. An extremely popular writer, she involved herself in, and wrote about, good causes such as the Samaritans. After her husband died she lived in a cottage in rural Berkshire, dying there in 1992.
http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/page...
http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/page...
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 27, 2021
I picked this up at used bookstore for $1.95. I had read and loved Monica Dickens' Mariana, but I wasn't so sure about this one. It was a story about people working a suicide hotline in a real life organization called the Samaritans that Dickens herself was very involved in. Even though, I knew Dickens was a great writer, I felt this book had the potential to be too saccharine or a propaganda piece for the organization.
It was not.
This book is really one of the best collections of character studies I've ever read. It takes places in a smallish city in England around 1970 and revolves around both the people who volunteer at the suicide hotline and the people who find themselves calling it. There's an upper class woman in her 30s who would rather spend time with homeless people to the chagrin of her uptight fiance, there's a teacher who lost his job in a scandal and whose wife is an alcoholic, a working class lesbian with a barbed tongue and a broken heart, a young man who has had literally no one to love him his entire life and ends up bewitched by a very damaged young woman, a newlywed who forms a friendship with a developmentally disabled teen who joie de vivre is thwarted by his mother's desperation to keep up appearances, a lonely American man on holiday whose family back in Boston is unaware he is gay, a college girl who is unpleasant in both countenance and personality and desperately needs a friend and all are fully drawn, messy, believable people. Nothing really happens in the book except people's lived are saved, people's lives aren't saved and people go on with their lives, and there often seems to be only a hair's breadth of difference in the exigence of the emotional struggles of the suicidal versus those called to help them.
I really dug this book and I'm glad I got to read it since it's been out of print for a while and I'm not sure it was ever in print in the U.S. If you ever come across it, grab it while you can!
It was not.
This book is really one of the best collections of character studies I've ever read. It takes places in a smallish city in England around 1970 and revolves around both the people who volunteer at the suicide hotline and the people who find themselves calling it. There's an upper class woman in her 30s who would rather spend time with homeless people to the chagrin of her uptight fiance, there's a teacher who lost his job in a scandal and whose wife is an alcoholic, a working class lesbian with a barbed tongue and a broken heart, a young man who has had literally no one to love him his entire life and ends up bewitched by a very damaged young woman, a newlywed who forms a friendship with a developmentally disabled teen who joie de vivre is thwarted by his mother's desperation to keep up appearances, a lonely American man on holiday whose family back in Boston is unaware he is gay, a college girl who is unpleasant in both countenance and personality and desperately needs a friend and all are fully drawn, messy, believable people. Nothing really happens in the book except people's lived are saved, people's lives aren't saved and people go on with their lives, and there often seems to be only a hair's breadth of difference in the exigence of the emotional struggles of the suicidal versus those called to help them.
I really dug this book and I'm glad I got to read it since it's been out of print for a while and I'm not sure it was ever in print in the U.S. If you ever come across it, grab it while you can!
August 12, 2016
Dickens examines the emotional lives of both those who use the Samaritans' service and the listeners themselves. She presents her characters with a sensitive voice, unflinching but not sentimental and without sensationalizing.
It's not much of a spoiler to say that at the outset you expect that at least one of her characters will complete a suicide attempt. That it's not at all obvious who that will be is a testament to Dickens's skill as a writer, as is her ability to make you care about the fates of her characters.
The details of the Samaritans' procedures and service are no longer accurate, much having changed since 1970 when the book was written. What has not changed is the Samaritans' commitment to helping alleviate the distress of those suffering emotional turmoil, despair and feelings of suicide. A fine attestation of the work they have done and continue to do.
http://www.samaritans.org/
116 123 (UK)
jo@samaritans.org
It's not much of a spoiler to say that at the outset you expect that at least one of her characters will complete a suicide attempt. That it's not at all obvious who that will be is a testament to Dickens's skill as a writer, as is her ability to make you care about the fates of her characters.
The details of the Samaritans' procedures and service are no longer accurate, much having changed since 1970 when the book was written. What has not changed is the Samaritans' commitment to helping alleviate the distress of those suffering emotional turmoil, despair and feelings of suicide. A fine attestation of the work they have done and continue to do.
http://www.samaritans.org/
116 123 (UK)
jo@samaritans.org
May 22, 2010
[These notes were made in 1984:]. I took more delight in this than I would have normally simply because I was reading it when I should have been getting on with something else. But on re-reading it, I still appreciated its virtues - a definite knack for creating characters and realistic dialogue - while I realized its flaws - its somewhat wishful structure, and idealization of the whole institution of Samaritans: an institution which exists and functions in a world which strongly resists idealization. The character of Peter - a mysterious, at times quasi-angelic figure - is a fine example of this idealization. In one way, we cling to him as a relief from all the grotty despair, even as we realize he's not fully integrated into the fallen world of all the rest of the characters. Dickens grapples quite well with the personal problems of her Samaritans, but there is a fundamental discrepancy in her treatment of some of them which leaves me queasy.
October 29, 2011
A realistic account of what it means to man the suicide hotline (in England the Samaritans). Sometimes it means befriending the friendless,sometimes it is a puzzle trying to work out why someone is calling out for help and why the wrong response may result in them killing themselves. I don't know if good writing is in anyway genetic but Monica Dickens writes very well and she is related to Charles Dickens.
April 23, 2012
Although the characters' stories were interesting, and it provided a good picture into the essential work of the Samaritans, I felt no connection at all with them.
July 3, 2013
I adored this novel. Out of all of Monica Dickens' books, this one touched me the most. I love her insight and her compassion telling the story of The Samaritans.
November 17, 2024
I loved this novel when I first read it aged sixteen. It felt grown-up and angry, “issues driven” and challenging. Unremittingly bleak and serious, it covered heavy, social realist topics such as broken relationships and domestic violence, substance abuse and urban deprivation, psychoses and suicide.
I have to say, four decades on, I found all this rather overwhelming - and tiresome. Everything is miserable and depressing, with nature and humanity reduced to unpleasant chemical or medical phenomena:
- “Some unidentifiable music seeped out of the walls like marsh gas.”
- “The New Town, name of Butterfields, not a cow in sight, spread like a brick psoriasis over the downs and meadows.”
- “She hugged the child close until the shivered, poor, botched, unbearable face, victim of something crueller than mere human sadism.”
I sometimes had the sense of a writer trying too hard to be hard boiled and cynical. Every detail seems to be described in gratuitously unsavoury and shocking terms:
- “He walked along the hoarding that hid a row of condemned shops, looking at the pictures of crippled children and men in bulging underpants and the swim-suit girls with hair pencilled on their crotches.”
- “Billie seethed at the boy in the dusty tight black trousers, his privates as offensive as a stallion.”
- “When she danced, her nipples showed through, purplish brown from having babies, not very attractive.”
Throughout the novel I was far more struck now - and surprised - by the sense of underlying bitterness and lack of warmth. The gritty realism of the novel extends to the characters who are often described with a sly maliciousness that reminded me of some of the crueller caricatures in her Grandfather Charles’ work:
- “Frank was a lorry driver running to fat before thirty, with all his small features crowded into the middle of his face, as if it was warmer there.”
- “Two girls in matching pink-flowered pants, their bottoms carved like jelly babies.”
- “The neat sterile woman with the cheese-paring mouth and the sliced bean nostrils.”
- “Girls with excess sebaceous secretions who had had no luck last summer on the Costa Brava.”
- “Her mouth was lined with some kind of furred sacking, like the bottom of a poultry feed bag.”
- “Lumpy, small-eyed, her nose like a Jerusalem artichoke, she was sadly unattractive.”
The structure of the novel also makes it hard to sympathise with the characters. The episodic narrative makes the novel seem like a screenplay for a jerkily-edited film. Sometimes I found it quite difficult to work out who people were or (I must be getting old) to remember what I’d read about them in earlier chapters.
Because every character in the novel is at best sad and “neurotic” and at worst desolate and psychotic, most of the characters seemed depressingly similar - whether Samaritan listener or client caller. Perhaps this is intentional - suggesting that we’re pretty much all the same really and equally desperate? But the fact that even the characters’ names are so bland and homogenous - all Peters and Pauls, Sarahs and Victorias - doesn’t help distinguish them much, either.
I spent a lot of time trying to work out which city it is that features in the novel. Specific clues - on the English south coast, seaside location, pier, university - mean it could be Portsmouth, Brighton or Southampton. I’m always fascinated by the location of novels and love tracking down real-life streets and parks and buildings that appear in novels. Sadly the clues didn’t fit together in this novel and I realised that it’s an entirely fictional Anytown and not a specific place.
And then I recognised that this was true of the characters as well. They’re types rather than real people - slightly two-dimensional representatives of different categories, such as the bullied husband, the lad with learning difficulties, the messianic Samaritan leader, the frustrated housewife and the sad homosexuals. And the arty girl with long blond hair, a sexy but insensitive husband and nice middle class parents - who works in a whole-foods shop, does pottery in her craft den and aches to make the world a happier place. No cliches here, then?
I’m curious that the tropes and stereotypes clearly didn’t strike me when I read the novel as a teenager. At that age I wanted social realist novels to expose the hypocrisy and unfairnesses of life. Now I just want the books I read to offer nuanced understanding and tender forgiveness of the human condition with its many contradictions and frailties ...
I have to say, four decades on, I found all this rather overwhelming - and tiresome. Everything is miserable and depressing, with nature and humanity reduced to unpleasant chemical or medical phenomena:
- “Some unidentifiable music seeped out of the walls like marsh gas.”
- “The New Town, name of Butterfields, not a cow in sight, spread like a brick psoriasis over the downs and meadows.”
- “She hugged the child close until the shivered, poor, botched, unbearable face, victim of something crueller than mere human sadism.”
I sometimes had the sense of a writer trying too hard to be hard boiled and cynical. Every detail seems to be described in gratuitously unsavoury and shocking terms:
- “He walked along the hoarding that hid a row of condemned shops, looking at the pictures of crippled children and men in bulging underpants and the swim-suit girls with hair pencilled on their crotches.”
- “Billie seethed at the boy in the dusty tight black trousers, his privates as offensive as a stallion.”
- “When she danced, her nipples showed through, purplish brown from having babies, not very attractive.”
Throughout the novel I was far more struck now - and surprised - by the sense of underlying bitterness and lack of warmth. The gritty realism of the novel extends to the characters who are often described with a sly maliciousness that reminded me of some of the crueller caricatures in her Grandfather Charles’ work:
- “Frank was a lorry driver running to fat before thirty, with all his small features crowded into the middle of his face, as if it was warmer there.”
- “Two girls in matching pink-flowered pants, their bottoms carved like jelly babies.”
- “The neat sterile woman with the cheese-paring mouth and the sliced bean nostrils.”
- “Girls with excess sebaceous secretions who had had no luck last summer on the Costa Brava.”
- “Her mouth was lined with some kind of furred sacking, like the bottom of a poultry feed bag.”
- “Lumpy, small-eyed, her nose like a Jerusalem artichoke, she was sadly unattractive.”
The structure of the novel also makes it hard to sympathise with the characters. The episodic narrative makes the novel seem like a screenplay for a jerkily-edited film. Sometimes I found it quite difficult to work out who people were or (I must be getting old) to remember what I’d read about them in earlier chapters.
Because every character in the novel is at best sad and “neurotic” and at worst desolate and psychotic, most of the characters seemed depressingly similar - whether Samaritan listener or client caller. Perhaps this is intentional - suggesting that we’re pretty much all the same really and equally desperate? But the fact that even the characters’ names are so bland and homogenous - all Peters and Pauls, Sarahs and Victorias - doesn’t help distinguish them much, either.
I spent a lot of time trying to work out which city it is that features in the novel. Specific clues - on the English south coast, seaside location, pier, university - mean it could be Portsmouth, Brighton or Southampton. I’m always fascinated by the location of novels and love tracking down real-life streets and parks and buildings that appear in novels. Sadly the clues didn’t fit together in this novel and I realised that it’s an entirely fictional Anytown and not a specific place.
And then I recognised that this was true of the characters as well. They’re types rather than real people - slightly two-dimensional representatives of different categories, such as the bullied husband, the lad with learning difficulties, the messianic Samaritan leader, the frustrated housewife and the sad homosexuals. And the arty girl with long blond hair, a sexy but insensitive husband and nice middle class parents - who works in a whole-foods shop, does pottery in her craft den and aches to make the world a happier place. No cliches here, then?
I’m curious that the tropes and stereotypes clearly didn’t strike me when I read the novel as a teenager. At that age I wanted social realist novels to expose the hypocrisy and unfairnesses of life. Now I just want the books I read to offer nuanced understanding and tender forgiveness of the human condition with its many contradictions and frailties ...
September 13, 2024
The "listeners" of the title are the Samaritans, operators who take care of people who are going through a difficult time not only by providing an empathetic ear over the phone but also in everyday life. The author introduces us to a series of characters, both among the Samaritans and their families and among their interlocutors but not all of them interesting and engaging. I have read other books of hers and I liked them better. This author has done the most disparate jobs in her life and has used the experiences she has had as a basis for her books which in fact are set in very different environments. In this case I had a hard time going on and finishing reading.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews