The Vet's Daughter Book

While reading Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, I was struck by the amount of information Barbara Comyns squeezed into that title. With this book, the opposite point could be made ' the title gives very little away. Yes, the main character/narrator is the daughter of a vet, but it isn't the fact that her father is a vet that is most significant in the story (though it provides a useful backdrop), rather that he is a brutal domineering parent and that his daughter must find a way to escape his control.

In the other books I've read by Barbara Comyns, there has been quite a cast of unloving parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, no doubt reflecting the state of the world as experienced by young women and children (Comyns' main characters) in the early decades of the twentieth century, the time in which she grew up. No matter how much I've heard about such abuses of power within the 'safety' of the family circle, it's still very disturbing to hear about them again, and when it is Barbara Comyns who is telling the tale, there's added shock value. Her skill as I understand it after reading six of her books, is the ability to combine the ordinary with the extraordinary. Some of the books contain more of the ordinary than I would like, but this one, and one or two of the others, soar beautifully towards the truly bizarre.