Claire Kilroy’s first novel in 10 years is a whole-body experience: reading it was, for me, like being elbowed through a rip in the space-time continuum back into the chaotic, exhausting, lovesick fog of the baby and toddler years. Anyone who has endured “the blurred days and the blurred nights” of early motherhood – or indeed anyone contemplating the possibility of embarking on them – be warned. You’re looking at a book-length panic attack.
The novel is brief but utterly remorseless – it comes at you full-throttle, as if delivered on a single breath. The internal monologue of a mother (the Soldier of the title) addressed to her son (Sailor), it exists, almost, outside of time. No context is provided, and only Soldier’s perspective is given; this is her description, unqualified and unquestioned, of “all I had lost and all I had gained”. That she’s an unreliable narrator – manifestly, almost luxuriously so – is neither here nor there. The point is that, in a world that has diminished her, reduced her to the near-voiceless role of “mother”, this is her experience. It’s her account of the feeling of finding herself torn out of what she had believed was her real life and deposited in a sleep-deprived, incoherent parallel universe where achieving anything is momentous but anything that is achieved is both negligible and banal. “I produced a shoe only to find you’d pulled off your sock,” she says of the teeth-grinding process of trying to leave the house. “I put the sock back on while you pulled off the other one. I put that one back on while you pulled off the first. Oh, it was all so stupid. People think that looking after an infant is basic. I know this because I once thought so myself.”
