In No Such Thing as Monday, Sian Hughes, whose earlier novel Pearl was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, spins a tale that has the reader so engrossed, they will need to shake themselves out of the book-induced reverie at the end.
It’s not a new tale, of a dysfunctional family headed by a violent bully, but Hughes plays her story like a fine-tuned violin, making the most evocative music emerge from it.
Narrated in the first person by the younger Cartwright daughter Stephanie/Steffie, the novel gives us a remarkably dry-eyed, unsentimental account of how she stumbles upon her dead father when she comes to his house to give him lunch. After which we move in non-linear fashion along with Steffie as she opens a Pandora’s Box of recollections, and learn about her father, Stan Cartwright, who arranged fights (dogfights, cockfights, fights between men) at the local bar and men’s club.
Stan is one nasty piece of work; he has long terrorised his meek wife into a state of constant fear; he regularly beats up his quiet, intelligent first-born Caroline, while lavishing love on the younger one, Steffie. He divides the room the girls share so Steffie gets the sole ceiling light while Caroline has to study by the light coming in from the street. Steffie casually recalls an act of cruelty without judgement: her father used to peel hardboiled eggs for the two of them, then throw the remaining eggs, ensuring the other two members of his family starved.
After Stan’s death, Steffie allows herself to admit to a Caroline-shaped hole in her heart. Her sister fled home when she was 16 and stayed off the radar. The rest of the book details Steffie’s wild life: becoming a drug-runner for a while, spending time in prison, and seemingly punishing herself for being Daddy’s favourite. All the while, she toys with the possibility of a reconciliation with her sister but never quite makes a move.
The picture the author paints of Caroline is a poignant one: pretty, smart, consistently scoring good grades, getting admission into a grammar school while Steffie has to settle for the local comprehensive. Now, Steffie has to live with the dreadful guilt of looking away, being in denial about what was happening to Caroline under the same roof, how she didn’t even register that her elder sister had fled daily beatings and starvation. That state of denial does rather startle the reader at the beginning, but Hughes provides such a clear glimpse into Steffie’s heart and psyche that all too soon, the reader begins to understand the immense survivor’s guilt she lives with, as also the fear cloaked in careless affection the ‘loved child’ learns to hide.
The voice of Stephanie is one that is original, wry, cynical, vulnerable, searingly honest. And the title is explained when Hughes tells the reader to imagine someone asserting that there’s no such thing as Monday, that Tuesday comes after Sunday. And how you learn to skip Monday, not to ever mention it, to keep the peace.
