Product Description

Narrated by the central heroine, Gert, a curator in a northern museum, this story is interwoven with flashbacks to her eccentric and often surreal childhood. She had a hopelessly vain mother, a father constantly away at his African crocodile farm and a twin brother who becomes a Buddhist monk.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #524431 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 350 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Gert works in the Egyptian room at a museum. At 35 her life is in stasis. Her mother, whom she hasn't seen for years, writes her a letter asking for help and forgiveness. At work, she sees a young woman ballroom dancing alone in the empty cafeteria and it's love at first sight. How can she seduce this pale-faced beauty? She starts remembering her strange childhood, how her father left for a crocodile farm in Africa and her mother started drinking while Gert and her twin brother Frank floated about in their own psychic spheres. Her articulation of this lonely time releases her from alienation and the novel pushes forward to its moving resolution.

Darling's prose would make any poet jealous. The idiosyncrasies of Gert's world and imagination are drawn so precisely that we can almost smell the house in which she grew up, almost feel physically transported to the particular corners of her outsider perspective. It is a novel about mothers and lovers and the struggle to grow up, a novel of spirit and humour wrought out of the mini-tragedies of adolescence and family psycho-drama which provoke Gert's mid-thirties crisis and its exorcism. Julia Darling is a real writer. This is a debut that promises a great career. --Hannah Griffiths

Review
Crocodile Soup is an inventive novel about Gert, a museum Egyptologist, who falls in love with Eva who works in the coffee shop. This narrative thread is intercut by the poignant story of Gert's childhood. Abandoned by her crocodile-farming father, she is relegated by her mother to the Far Nursery, a place haunted by the ghost of a Victorian poet. Both touching and funny, the novel is packed with beautiful and startling images. Review by JACQUI LOFTHOUSE Editor's note: Jacqui Lofthouse is author of The Temple of Hymen, a tale of sexual intrigue and political unease. (Kirkus UK)

A British writer, reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson, debuts with an edgy, richly imagined and beautifully crafted novel that charts the search for love of a thirtyish lesbian whose life is a long surreal nightmare interrupted by the kindness of a few men and women. Archaeologist Gert, who tells her story with the occasional interpolation of pleading letters from her estranged mother, has fallen in love with Eva, a young woman who serves coffee in the cafeteria of the museum where they both work. As Gert relates her nervous pursuit of Eva, she also recalls her troubled childhood, growing up with equally troubled Frank, her twin, in a house haunted by a long-dead famous woman poet, and parents who didnt get along. George, her father, a man of confused ambitions, soon fled to Africa to raise crocodiles for handbags, and her stylish mother Jean, who married for money, couldnt cope with the responsibilities of being a wife and mother. Gert sees ghosts, roams the house at night, and once thinks she's been swallowed by Frank. A perceptive psychologist helps, but her fears and bizarre experiences continue, exacerbated when her father dies and the family money runs out. As an adult, her pursuit of Eva goes nowherea weekend at the seaside is a disaster; then Gert is injured in a car crash, escapes from a sinister hospital, and learns she's lost her job. She continues her recollection of the past that includes Frank's suicide and her surprisingly enlightening encounter with lesbian activists. And while she ponders a response to her mother, Gert finds herself befriended by an old friend of Eva's. A darkly comic, sometimes strained, but always impressively inventive story about family and the unpredictability of love as a woman, against heavy odds, finally finds herself. (Kirkus Reviews)

From the Back Cover
Gert Hardcastle is thirty-something and unlucky in love. As the novel opens, she thinks she has found The One - Eva, who works in the cafeteria of the northern museum where Gert catalogues the Egyptian artefacts. As Gert embarks on her hilarious and poignant pursuit, she looks back on her eccentric childhood.

Customer Reviews

Wonderful
This is a moving, funny and insightful novel, with brilliant writing on every page. Julia Darling has a voice unlike anyone else's. It is quite simply a great book.

Tender and Funny
This book reminded me very much of Kate Atkinson's "Behind The Scenes At The Museum" - which was fine by me, because I loved that too. The writing is stylish but understated and the gentle mixture of humour and sadness was lovely. A real pleasure to read.

Murky family soup
The narrator's dead brother Frank says that Gert always inteprets everything in an extreme way. Perhaps the au pair did not drown, only let the lilo adrift. Perhaps Gert was not responsible for breaking her mother's legs when she was a toddler. Perhaps the ghost of a dead female poet did not really appear in the family house. Did her brother commit suicide? (Really in fiction or really in real ife, because this is a novel that draws heavily on Julia Darling's life.) Did her father really go off to run a crocodile farm in Africa? And then disappear forever on a sailing trip?

This is murky family soup, offered up by a narrator on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And who's to say whether it is Gert's extreme interpretation of reality that is causing the breakdown, or reality taking an extreme turn? This is a book that uses the surreal to describe realistically what life feels like on the edge.

Small things are becoming big, like the black sacks of hospital waste that the cleaners dump at the back of her flats, and the museum's prize mummy going missing. But big things are presented in quite a small way too, like falling in love with a woman who isn't in love with you. And Mum writing to say that Cameron's dead and can she come and live with you; like losing your job; like not talking about your brother dying. And at the end the book takes us back down to earth and Gert faces up to the big things.