Geneticist Yvonne Carmichael is in her early fifties. She is good at what she does and competent and sensible in every part of her life. So much so that her affair with Mark Costley, who she presumes is a spy, takes her almost by surprise. She’s a little obsessive about this guy, although it is difficult to see why as he does seem a bit of a thoughtless prat. But just when you’re getting a bit tired of her obsessing, (SPOILER ALERT) the novel takes a sharp left turn and ventures into truly shocking territory when Yvonne is raped by a colleague. She tells Mark; he kills the rapist and both Mark and Yvonne are put on trial for murder. The trial is fascinating. Every reason Yvonne had for not reporting the rape to the police (or her husband) proves valid, and it’s ugly. Apple Tree Yard is a brutal reminder of the physical vulnerability of women, and how utterly open to eviscerating attack and judgement we become when an allegation of rape is made. This despite Yvonne’s earlier reminiscences about women’s advancement since suffragettes, “We can [now] sleep with whomever we like – within the limits of our own personal morality of course – just like men do. No one takes us to the village square and stones us any more, or places metal torture devices in our mouths for talking too much, or drowns us in a pond because a man we rejected has accused us of being a witch. We are safe, surely now, in this time, this country, we are safe.” Well. Think again, sister.
It’s a very good book but not a perfect one – I found the first person narrative irritating, with Yvonne consistently addressing her lover as ‘you’. She largely fails to convey why she is so utterly enamoured of him. I would have liked, also, to know more about her bipolar son. It seems at one point she is going to tell us all about him, then she doesn’t. But the portrait of a long marriage feels real – the comfort and the silence within it, the understanding. As Yvonne says, the “glue of a long marriage..isn’t whether you are each other’s soul mate or intellectual equal: it’s whether you are both happy with no more than an exchange of grunts over breakfast.” What she does, and what is done to her, tests this marriage to its extreme. The book is an intelligent portrait of people transgressing, of the cruel and beautiful things we do to one another, and the consequences.
