Lemon: Kwon Yeo-sun

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something that’s learned as they grow up? It can be both? It can be caused by a combination of factors?”

Pros included some insight to redress the love openly given to Panky and how maybe we should choose our heroes carefully and indeed a woman who’s contribution to our animal world which has been vastly overlooked being brought to our attention. The book’s initial focus is upon a singular woman, Alice Battershall - an exploited slum worker engaged in the preparation of feathers for the ‘Murderous Millinery’ trade- whose occupation provided fashionable headwear for the upper classes. Then Emmeline Pankhurst steps up to demand rights and the vote for women, including those like Alice. These suffragettes (unlike the earlier, peace abiding suffragists) were militant but glamorous feminists, who wore the plumage of the ostrich, osprey and various other species that were hunted to the brink of extinction. Such women used their feminine appearance to strengthen their fight by showing that they hailed from the upper echelons of society but also as a surprise tactic. Who expected a ‘lady’ to wreak havoc and break shop windows, even of those milliners who provided their hats! This is an area of social history which would benefit from further study and research. Boase’s narrative occasionally lapses into the first person when she explains some instances of her own research. At times she does not completely succeed in meshing the histories of the radical suffragettes and the conservative conservationists. Nevertheless, this was an enlightening read complete with fashion photographs that some readers may find quite horrifying to modern sensibilities. When we cringe in horror we should chasten ourselves with the memory of fur coats, worn not so long ago. I have to admit that I struggled with Lemon. Going into this book the blurb gave me the impression that it would be much more of a thriller than it turned out to be.

Lemon

This book covers some fascinating areas: the early conservation of birds and the foundation of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), the women’s suffrage movement, the deplorable conditions of the working class in the Victorian & Edwardian eras and also attitudes towards, and economic significance of, women’s fashion. With all these areas to combine the task is ambitious but the author has presented an engrossing piece of social history in a highly readable text. I was more aware of the suffrage story. I knew who Emmeline and her daughters were and I knew something about what they went through (imprisonment). I wasn't aware that there were numerous suffrage groups and an active and influential anti-suffrage movement.

Boase plants herself firmly in the middle ground between the two women, sympathetic to both, almost becoming the go between between their causes.The chapters float in spare streams of consciousness. Details are minimal, lending the few remembered scenes the fuzziness of a dream. (In a conversation between Da-on and Sanghui about their shared writing class, they reminisce about reading Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; it’s easy to see the reference as a nod to Kwon’s own influences.) The narrators speak from the future, but it’s not clear where they’ve arrived. This question is amplified in Taerim’s chapters, which read as a kind of ouroboric monologue. Theoretically she’s looking for help, but she can’t stop interrupting herself long enough to ask for it. Kwon is masterful at maintaining a low level of doubt, never delivering a straightforward narrative but never straying so far from it that the work falls into incoherence. Hong’s translation is spare, lyrical. There’s a sense of writing around intentional gaps. What aren’t they telling us? Life has no special meaning. Not his, not my sister's, not even mine. Even if you try desperately to find it, to contrive some kind of meaning, what's not there isn't there. Life begins without reason and ends without reason." It's a sly, subtle piece of literary crime, carefully playing on its shifting perspectives to unsettling effect. An intriguing read