I don’t know if you have ever stood in the middle of a squash court — on the T — and listened to what is going on next door. What I’m thinking of is the sound from the next court of a ball hit clean and hard. It’s a quick, low pistol-shot of a sound, with a close echo. The echo, which is the ball striking the wall of the court, is louder than the shot itself. This is what I hear when I remember the year after our mother died, and our father had us practising at Western Lane two, three, four hours a day.
Western Lane is a short domestic drama, a coming-of-age story, about surviving grief and making connections through one’s actions when words are no longer up to the task. Author Chetna Maroo writes in short, unadorned sentences that nonetheless capture something true about the experience of loss, and despite its brevity, I felt a real emotional punch with this. I liked the details from the family’s Indian-British (Jain) culture, I liked the particular POV of our eleven-year-old protagonist — who is feeling uniquely responsible for getting her father through his own grief at the same time she’s experiencing her first crush — and I even liked the bits on the squash courts that lead to an exciting tournament sequence. There is a lot packed in here, and while I would give it 3.5 stars if I could, I’ll round up to four (mostly to rank this higher than some of the other titles on the Booker longlist. Do I expect it to be shortlisted? Maybe not?)
Much later, Khush would say that that night was really the start of it, of Pa’s thinking about what he would do with us. It wasn’t Aunt Ranjan. It was Uncle Pavan talking about the past. But I think Pa told us himself what moved him. He sat beside us one morning on the bench outside the squash court and said, “I want you to become interested in something you can do your whole life.”
After a warning from his sister-in-law that his three daughters are at risk of “going wild” after the loss of their mother, “Pa” decides to focus on the girls’ squash skills at the local rec centre, Western Lane. As they run drills and “ghost” skills, Gopi (the youngest sister at eleven) emerges as the greatest talent; and when she starts training with thirteen-year-old Ged — the son of a white woman who works at the facility and whose attention from the girls’ father becomes concerning to their community — their friendship will start to fill in some of Gopi’s empty spaces. The relationship between the sisters is lovely — they are all good kids working to get their family through their tragedy — but even as Gopi continues to improve and attracts the attention of someone who thinks she should enter a local tournament, their father seems to be slipping further away from them:
After one of these silences, we heard Pa asking Ged’s mother if she didn’t feel, sometimes, that there was too much time. He asked her if things terrorised her, like hours, or the expressions on a child’s face, or the clattering of lids on pans. Maybe she moved in some way that told Pa she understood. He was quiet, and then he said: “The children. The girls. Sometimes I look at them and think they will eat me.”
Perhaps predictably so, Gopi puts a lot of pressure on herself to save her father through her performance at the tournament — this, after sacrificing herself in other ways — but there is something interesting about the way that Maroo uses sport as a metaphor for the disassociation of grief (Gopi sees herself moving through grief while still inside the grief; sees herself moving through game play while still in the game; marvels at seeing the Milky Way on the horizon while acknowledging her place in it), and it all worked for me. In different circumstances I might round this down to three stars, but there’s something to this and I’m glad I read it.
Booker Prize Longlist 2023
A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’
Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein * My favourite of the list
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escofferey
How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney
This Other Eden by Paul Harding
Pearl by Siân Hughes
All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
