Book Review: "Soldier Sailor" by Claire Kilroy

I have no idea how I actually came across this book. It was pretty much by chance. I liked the idea of the book, I liked the look of the book and I had seen it advertised in a couple of places on X. I read the blurb over and over again of what was advertised and thought to myself: I have to read this. Then I put it aside again and carried on. This went on for about a week before I gave in and bought the book. I am so bloody glad I did because reader, this book was a new level of extreme. The emotion that Kilroy conveys through the narrator is nothing short of a long-winded breakdown of emotion and nerves. It is fantastic, angry and feels like electricity is coursing through the veins of the protagonist, being beamed upon the reading public in sprays.

The book starts off with a baby and it sounds like a letter written to him by his mother about his beginnings. She has a fight with her husband and she hates him for being absent during the time where she must get up and nurse the baby at night time - he remains asleep and does nothing to help. He does not want to be involved in the more challenging aspects of raising a child and we, as women, know this behaviour too well whether we have had children or not. Men get away with doing the absolute bare minimum of everything - subpar and substandard, it's better just to get on with your own stuff. And that is what our protagonist does.

But this involves almost killing the baby in order to punish her husband. Now, I don't agree with this - if you are going to punish the husband I would recommend putting the television in the bin and selling the microwave. But it goes hard in explaining the link between husband-childishness and the reactions of post-partum depression towards it. Kilroy writes this wonderfully in the first person as if she is performing it at that moment but we know it is written in past tense.

The language is probably the best thing about this book because Kilroy makes a point of stating that a mother would do anything to keep her child out of harm's way - even by putting herself in that harm's way in order to keep her kid safe. She talks about the Virgin Mary a lot and how she too, had nobody there to protect her during childbirth and how, when her child was about to be killed, she could do nothing to stop it but suffered the most due to that trauma of watching her child die. I liken this to Eleanor of Acquitaine who's child (King Richard I of England) actually died in her arms. I cannot possibly imagine what that is like to feel.

Another thing about the language of this book is there is visceral emotion within it. It makes no mistake of illuminating the most difficult emotions to be viewed as normal under the microscope of the humanity of women. She makes this grand point of stating that men have no compassion for women and do not care to know how they are feeling as long as they keep looking after them. It is only when women stop caring for men do they care how women feel.

Nobody ever changes, the novel implies, people just grow bored of trying to get others on to their sides, men and women. I recognise that this is a fault of her mental state and this is shaky throughout the entire novel and, I believe that's the point - she may have a husband but she doesn't have anyone who actually cares about her. These types of men will virtue signal at every angle claiming to protect women but in the everyday world, these same men are the perpetrators against our very existence.

The one thing I found quite strange about this novel but does not take away from its beauty, is the fact that it seems to be written as a suicide note to her son. This would be a huge deal if more men actually read it and became more aware of women's struggles in the everyday. However, we can all dream. I think though, that the inclusion of this weird suicide note intention to her son has made me realise yet another thing: I would like, if I haven't established it already, to remain husband-free throughout my entire life. You thought I was going to say child-free, weren't you? Adoption is always an option.

As we whirl through her life and people pop up here and there, she wants to be the woman she used to be but will it work? Kilroy writes one of the most stressful novels you'll ever read as a woman and I think it is so important to acknowledge this as a true women's novel. It's an awesome reckoning of women's fiction which borders on a nonfiction for so many.