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HT reviewer Shireen Quadri picks her favourite read of 2023
A taut, and well-wrought work of psychological fiction told from the first-person perspective of an unnamed narrator
I have always liked short novels; it’s hard to pick those running into more than 350-400 pages for the simple reason that I fear I might not be able to finish them. I picked up Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience when it made it to the 2023 Booker Prize longlist in September, along with Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane, which runs to a mere 160 pages. The Scotland-based Canadian writer’s second novel, at 190 odd pages, unpacks quite a lot. A taut, and well-wrought work of psychological fiction, it is told — like her raw and poised first novel, The Coming Bad Days (2021) — from the first-person perspective of an unnamed narrator. A young woman, to be more precise, who became “all that had ever been asked” of her but, in the process, ceased to exist. The narrator relocates from the place of her birth (unnamed, again; shorn of specificity, signifying universality) to the remote northern country of her forebears to take care of her businessman brother, whose wife has left him. The sense of dread, foreboding and intrigue is palpable in the opening lines (the beginning is not quite the beginning for the novel starts in medias res): “It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. It was a swift and menacing time. One of the local dogs was having a phantom pregnancy. Things were leaving one place and showing up in another.”
As I kept flipping the pages, somewhat feverishly, the novel’s larger arc revealed itself. Even as the narrator immerses herself in caring for her brother, things start to take a dark turn. A chain of inexplicable events takes place. And there is only one person who has to bear the burden of the blame: the narrator, seen as an incomer, someone who doesn’t quite belong there. There is a hint of incest, too, with passing references to the fractured relationship the narrator shared with her brother, and her parents. Though she explores the questions of power and complicity as well as inheritance and displacement, Bernstein also seems to be invested in the fragility of life and the difficulties of living. All of us — in some measure and at some point or another — give in, willy-nilly, to the exigencies of the world. Women — conditioned to be subservient and err on the side of caution — have to do that more often. In every culture. In Study for Obedience, Bernstein seems to underscore precisely this.
READ MORE: HT reviewers pick their best reads of 2023
Shireen Quadri is the editor of The Punch Magazine Anthology of New Writing: Select Short Stories by Women Writers.
