Book Review: "The Scent of Dried Roses" by Tim Lott

Used bookshops are all the rage if you've got a little bit of money in your pocket. Some books are as cheap as perhaps a few pounds and of course, therefore much cheaper than Amazon - including sometimes Amazon's digital borrowing service. I recently hankered around some used online bookshops and found a few texts that were sort of random. I'm going to admit I didn't read the backs of them before buying - I just bought ones that were cheap and on sale. This is the first of the books in that realm, about family, mental illness, suicide all set against a backdrop of an ever-changing Southall, London...

We start by being introduced to the narrator's parents: Jack and Jean. Jean is clearly a woman who represents herself as being of sound mind, but when she kills herself early on in this memoir, the narrator must revisit their own suicidal tendencies to investigate whether this is more of a family thing that is being let on. As we are taken around, we also see Southall on the cusp of a great change. From being a fairly white area - there are other people who begin to move in. One of these groups include the Sikhs and the narrator agrees that these migrations into Southall deepen its sense of identity and grow the area economically. People begin to go out to restaurants that they did not have before - cuisines they are beginning to love and the changing landscape definitely makes for an interesting story of place.

I loved the way the author spoke about revising his family's history, going through how his mother came to commit suicide. He looks at the death of a woman which sent someone else into their bed for ages (I'm being purposefully vague about the characters as to not give too much away). There are markers for depression in various places which, because of the politeness and the 'carry on' attitude, wasn't really talked about too much. But, it became more than apparent that these people could not, in fact, carry on at all.

As we move through this story, we also gain access to the author themselves. From the 1960s and 1970s, we see how his life became shaped by his circumstances and his relationship with his older brother, Jeff. Whilst at school, the author states that his brother Jeff was obviously a bit of competition - talking sooner about his brother's organised lifestyle and conservative nature. There's a part of the book where Jeff organises all of his records and Tim explains that his own records were all messy. It seemed almost symbolic of who Jeff became later on as he went for a marriage of convenience to move to America which of course, went worse than simply 'badly'. I was totally stunned by the way in which the writer penned his own relationships, failed, as well. He talks about a woman named Kate who he found himself completely in love with and it didn't work out. He then talks about another woman who he keeps going back to after breaking up with - until she no longer takes him back because he clearly needs help.

He writes about his own mental breakdown. He loses jobs, resigns after only a few weeks at some and then spends many days not shaving or washing, just lying in bed. He has panic attacks and explores the nature of his own death by penning suicide notes and looking into methods he may use in order to stop the chaos of existence. The advice for getting out of depression is perhaps not very workable, but the experience of his depression is something to be read and read again. He has these intense moments of feeling and experience into his own mental state - an instrospection. But then on the other hand, he has moments of flat, unfeeling and complete apathy. His mother comes to sit at his bedside with this quiet calm. So when her suicide does come around, it is shocking, but he definitely seeks to make sense of it in his own head as being relative to his own experience of the same illness. Even though he admits that there are all different kinds of depression, he does believe that perhaps, he understood something, however small, about his mother.

All in all, this book has to be one of my favourites of the entire year. It is an all-consuming novel that I completely ate up and, if you wish to understand the nature of suicidal tendencies and how people disappear into their own minds, then I would highly recommend this book. I cannot help but recommend it enough - it is such an important book to read.