What We Did in the Dark

by Ajay Close

I made what may be called a rash and foolish marriage to a man I scarcely knew.

1904: Cathie longs for adventure. A whirlwind romance with soldier and artist Herbert Jackson offers this and more, but Herbert is violently jealous and she is soon fighting for her freedom – and her life. A fictionalised account of Catherine Carswell’s first marriage, What We Did in the Dark is a compelling portrait of a trail-blazing writer.

320 pages, Paperback

First published February 13, 2020

About the author

Ajay Close is a Scottish-based dramatist and writer of literary fiction. Her novels explore the emotional flashpoints of place, politics and family. Her latest, What Doesn't Kill Us, is a fictional reworking of real events in 1970s Yorkshire.

Reviews

[Mark O'Neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a result of the catastrophic impact of World War I, the fifteen or so years before 1914 are often seen through a nostalgic lens as a time of stability and calm. In fact Edwardian Britain was changing radically and riven with social conflict, including major strikes, the first stirrings of rebellion in the colonies (the Boer War), the threat of an army mutiny over Irish Home Rule and actions by suffragettes that would now be classed as terrorist. These Big History changes played out in the lives of individuals in profound ways - Virginia Woolf famously wrote that "On or around December 1910, human character changed.... The change was not sudden and definite like that, but a change there was, nevertheless". What We Did in the Dark is Ajay Close's second novel set in the period, exploring these 'changes in human nature', using real people as the basis for her stories. A Petrol Scented Spring explored the Suffragette movement, not as a sweeping epic, but by getting up close and personal with one of the most intense points of the conflict - the force feeding of one suffragette prisoner who is on hunger strike. This new novel similarly addresses huge themes and major social change through the crisis of one disastrous relationship, a marriage which failed so profoundly that it resulted in a change in the laws on divorce. The new determination of women to shape their own lives and the traumatic impact of the Boer War, not on South Africa, but on Britain, are not semaphored as the Big Themes of the book. Instead they are revealed through a vivid, disturbing and profound account of the day to day (or night to night) experience of Cathie, after her impulsive marriage and her discovery of the shocking truth about her handsome husband. The changes in human nature which Virginia Woolf saw emerging a hundred years ago are still being worked through today, in everything from the effects of the Iraq War to the #MeToo movement. What We Did in the Dark is a rare example of a historical novel that is both true to its period and profoundly relevant to the present. It is also moving and beautifully written.

[Iain · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was new to Ajay Close’s work but I was a fan by the end of the first page. Her prose manages to be both dense and light at the same time, packing in layers of meaning, stacking ambiguity while retaining a summery playfulness that hooks you from the start. The closest analogy for the punch her prose packs is Mohammed Ali – her sentences really do float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. The style perfectly suits the subject matter. It’s a book that announces its tragedy early on, undercutting the lightness with impending melancholy. This fictionalised Catherine Carswell is bright, witty, fiercely intelligent but with stormy depths, and it is a delight to spend time in her – and Close’s – company.

[Alena · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a find! Picked at random and very glad I did.
I'd never heard of Catherine Carswell but will seek her work out, and I can only hope I'll recognise in her the remarkable and relateable woman that Close created here.
The imperialist horrors of the Boer war, a Scottish woman's ever-so-slight detachment and yet full complicity give this novel a current significance that makes it so much more than a period piece about the thrill of modernity, the new century and the power of a woman's will. There is just so much in here.

[Elspeth Cherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ajay Close excels in this kind of historical novel which is impeccably researched and convincingly set in its period. What she brings to life in a modern way is a bit like looking at very early cine films which have been colourised and speed adjusted. Suddenly the humanity and complexity of a historic time are revealed. Her writing richly captures the feeling of each moment as the characters struggle to come to terms with what they are experiencing. I didn't know anything about Catherine Carswell before I read this or about her historic divorce.
Ajay traces Catherine's journey from an eccentric religious upbringing in Glasgow tenements through her entry on the fringes of fashionable literary society to her encounter with DH Lawrence at the core of modernism. Just 19, Catherine steps into a terrible marriage, prompted by the need to cover up a pregnancy, and must pick her way through her new husband's avoidance of that crucial consummation, gas-lighting and physical abuse - all in a foreign land - before she undertakes the extreme finality of public divorce. Ajay counterpoints the young wife's misery with letters passed to her much later via her brother-in-law. These papers show that her husband suffers from what we would now identify as PTSD, caused possibly by underlying communication difficulties but certainly compounded by conditions in the Boer War.
Through this intimate portrait of a marriage we see the determination of one woman to fight to retain her own identity without losing her sense of compassion. It is because she seeks the truth about the marriage into which she has willingly been duped that we are able to understand how rigid male and female stereotypes bend and corrupt the psyche. Modernism itself went on to address the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation and here we catch a glimpse of its early development.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title - 'What we did in the dark' - is perfect, and becomes more so as the (real-life) story progresses. Alternating between Cathie's tragic-but-facing-up-to account of brand-new married life - she aware that in some ways she deserves to suffer - and the fall-out from the horrific experiences of Herbert's failures of command during the Boer war (gleaned from Herbert's letters to his brother; brutal accounts of cruelty and humiliation) this tells of her dislocation and increasing claustrophobia in a tale of dark and sometimes darker.
The lightness, the greatest pleasure, is in the writing, especially in Cathie's account. And in the creation of the finale which at times was unbearably tense.

I do find the ability to re-imagine the lives of real people both hugely impressive and a little ... unsettling? ... but from the first was assured I was in good hands.