The Turning Circle
Jill Slee Blackadder is compelled by a novel with a strong Quaker thread
Janni first saw Alice when she was eight, but only briefly: ‘even as she looked, the girl began to look transparent, like a projected picture and then she faded away entirely’. Janni is a child of our time but Alice, who becomes her only real friend, lived in the same house three hundred years before.
Biddy Vousden’s The Turning Circle, her first book, is a gem. Set in a Fenland village, she weaves themes of loneliness, adolescence, adjusting to change, friendship and family life simultaneously into two vastly different historical periods – our own and that of the dissenters – in the fraught decades of religious oppression from which the pilgrim fathers sought release.
Any reader’s resistance to the switching of Janni from ‘now’ to ‘then’ is eased by Janni’s own alarm, and her struggles to understand and to control events or, at least, to come to terms with the seeming impossibility of her growing friendship across several centuries. Travel through time in fiction is a well-used device, but the author goes beyond the conventional approach. She blends imagination and research and uses real life characters, figureheads and historical incidents from the time to bring a sense of stark reality into the mounting tension of the story.
Well known names from Quaker history – the Mayflower, the Speedwell, William Hickman, Dorothy Bradford, Mary Brewster, Bridget Robinson, John Cotton – journeys, triumphs and tragedies, are suddenly unbearably vivid and painful. Landscapes, too, take on a new significance, as the reader identifies with real life before and after the draining of the Fens.
A school history topic is the clever device used to draw us with Janni into a growing understanding of the trauma of living under the menacing eye of the church and the law. Biddy Vousden cleverly uses the project to reinforce Janni’s (and our own) grasp of the political context of the period. Researching her project takes Janni into a Quaker Meeting house and a masterly twist in the plot brings the two girls together for the last time.
The descriptive detail is mesmerising, using all the senses with such delicacy that the reader drifts with Janni between these contrasting worlds, sharing her love of wild flowers, wild birds, awareness of the changing seasons, the tastes of food and the feel of the coats of sheep and cattle. The characters in the book are delightfully portrayed: diverse, convincing and memorable. Janni’s warm, committed teacher characters are particularly beautifully crafted. In handling the emotional aspects of the characters – confusion, anxiety and fear – I suspect that the author draws heavily on her years of experience as a teacher herself and as a mother. She credits the children with helping the book in many ways.
This book will delight many:- adults and older children alike. The slow starting pace increases, building tension to the dramatic ending. It is beautifully written and a pleasure to read aloud. A copy should be on the shelves of every Quaker Meeting house and the shelves of many other places of worship too.
The Turning Circle is already a part of the Quaker in me and it makes me hungry for more Quaker history. It is a little, gentle, Quakerly bombshell of a book. It took me by stealth and I couldn’t put it down. I wanted to race to the end to find out what happened, but at the same time I didn’t want it to come to an end at all.
In a way, it never will come to an end, for Biddy Vousden has written a book that lights a candle of concern and curiosity in your mind. You wonder: who were the local dissenters? How did they manage? Did some of them set out for the ‘New World’ and how many actually made it all the way?
The Turning Circle by Biddy Vousden, Dancing Deer Press, 2014, ISBN: 9780992891404, £6.99.
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