Book Review: "Study for Obedience" by Sarah Bernstein

This book was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2023 and so, I am astonished at the lack of people who have actually read it. It's a poetic book with prose written in lengthy paragraphs relating to all sorts of things from paintings and artists to the notion of obedience in following orders. Bernstein creates great landscapes and pictures through her words and manages to interpret and gather the landscape as a means of freedom and yet, it is still an isolating atmosphere. The pervading and impending doom underneath the storyline gets slowly louder and quieter as we hit different parts of the story, from the present to the past - the unnamed (and rather unreliable) narrator takes us back and forth. The text is constantly emotionally jarring the reader but maintains the pace of a jittering train travelling constantly against its will, begging to be repaired before it bursts open.

The unnamed narrator must travel north to a place where she does not really understand life or language to look after her eldest brother who has no family and no friends as his wife and children left him. She is to be his housekeeper and the jobs she has to do makes you wonder how his wife leaving him only happened right now. Her brother has been ostracised by the entire community though it is not exactly clear as to why - there are hints of it here and there, but I will not say out of fear of giving the game away. Long story short, for the beginning, our narrator feels out of place - only learning her place more when she analyses nature. Birds, rabbits, frogs etc. come about in this strange and bewildering story and are painted with metaphorical devices for new and impressive meanings.

The more she tries to integrate into the town the more things start to go awry. It becomes weirder and weirder, the pervading sense of dread increasing and the impending doom becoming forever louder. The language barrier is a great metaphor for the entire 'study' of obedience. The study is about humans and their uses of language, how different uses of language can create friendships and others can create these boundaries that make things more difficult for everyone. The folkish atmosphere adds to that dread of the 'other' as our unnamed narrator actually comes from the city - the countryside she travels to is just the first of many odd and entangled barriers that she must try to make sense of.

The depictions of beauty and the grotesque are brilliant in their dichotomy. Sarah Bernstein's use of language to help us to understand this binary opposition as occuring naturally is a great way of reinforcing this sense of pervading dread that is cemented from the very beginning of the book. From the 'other' to the 'normal' and back to the 'other' again, this book has a grand stage for our unnamed narrator to start going a bit 'stir crazy' in wide outdoors - a masterpiece of otherness.

Here is a quotation that I love:

“I had never been able to live in my life.”

This quotation hit me quite hard because from the very beginning of the book, the unnamed narrator seemed so liberated and yet, we still get the sense that she is drawn back by listening to the rules. She does things she is supposed to do purely because she is supposed to do them. She has no freedom of choice in what she might do and she has no choice about where she might go. She is just constantly drawn back by others who request her assistance for the dumbest reasons.

In conclusion, this is a story about the minimisation of a woman's own needs in order to be obedient to her eldest brother who is orderly but useless. I believe that more people need to read this book but I do warn you for this book cannot be read once and understood. It is a complex painting of language into a landscape of differing, doom and sadness as the othering becomes larger, so does the complexity of the language.

To end, here is one more quotation:

“I tended to be deferential, basically meek, tugging at the proverbial forelock until all my hair fell out. This attitude presented its own set of problems – namely, that meekness brings out the sadist in people, the atavistic desire to bite at the heels of the runt of the litter.”