An epistolary novel - done well - appeals to my liking for order and neatness. The form involves a degree of focus, often on a smallish scale; it invites the succinct making of a point and a coherent response; it requires the development of a theme or a line of plot in a rhythmic and cohesive manner, and if all those strands are held together with the right degree of tension, the weave of the story is smooth and the pattern of the finished piece is pleasing.
Anne Youngson's debut Meet me at the Museum shows she has mastered the skills. It's a quiet book, a picture of middle life in muted colours, a study of how we come to know ourselves through our own narratives. I found it engaging, moving, and satisfying, and I was sorry to reach the final page.
Tina is an East Anglian farmer's wife. The death of her great friend Bella prompts her to write to a Danish archaeologist with whom she and her schoolfriends corresponded about the Tollund Man some fifty years earlier. She is preoccupied with "plans never fulfilled" - specifically but not exclusively the wish she shared with Bella to visit the Silkeborg Museum to see the famous bog man. She writes to make sense of her thoughts, to try to move forward after many years of being held back. In truth she doesn't expect a reply.
The archaeologist, it turns out, is long dead, but Anders the museum curator writes back to Tina. He patiently answers her factual questions, and she responds with more about the history of her intention to visit Silkeborg and the exhibit, but perhaps because her correspondent is a stranger she is unlikely to meet she is unusually frank, confiding details of her "buried" life, bogged down on the farm, an existence which circumstances had forced her into accepting. Anders in turn reveals his own sadness and regrets, and as their letters move them further from the general and the impersonal, their correspondence nurtures an intimacy, an organic relationship which grows in value to surprise them both.
As they write to one another Tina and Anders try to make order out of chaos, consider chance and fate and choice, and how the past has led to the present. As Tina says, "I thought I knew where [my life] was roughly darned and where neatly patched, but despite all the flaws in the fabric, I believed in the essential wholeness of it"; as an unravelling occurs so there will be a reworking, a making new.
A touching book, beautifully, intelligently written, profound in its way. I look forward to seeing what Anne Youngson does next.
... 
