“Little actually happens but” – Study for Obedience by Sara Bernstein #bookershortlist2023

“Little actually happens, but (LAHB)” begins one of the sentences in the Guardian review of Sara Bernstein’s second book, Study for Obedience, and so important is this four word precis that we thought we would put it up front for you. Obviously, we know – don’t we – that a great many literary novels exist in the glacial shift of a nuance level on par with an imagined eyebrow twitch or the possibly deluded memory of something someone once said to someone we once knew who whispered it to us while we were drunk at the back of a nightclub playing earbleedingly loud music. Even taking that as tacitly agreed between us, Study for Obedience is a new level of LAHB.

Our nameless narrator comes to live with her older brother who is worldly-wise and successful but also possibly at the beginning of decline in terms of his health. Our nameless narrator is a curious sort, verbose to the nth degree but also, for the most part, humble to the nth degree. She has also wound about her a sense of herself as odd, outside, an outlier, even within her own family, who seemingly mocked the very bejesus out of her.

“The difference between me and anyone else was not that I wanted more to be good, it was not even that I was guiltier, no, it was something rather difficult to place, a surface placidity with which I moved through the days, plodding, plodding…”

Her brother lives in a big house in a small rural village. The villagers seem to have made their peace with him but the arrival of his sister upsets them and (we learn ever so ever so gradually) certain worrying omens and portents (a dog’s phantom pregnancy, the demise of a ewe, a potato blight etc) are (our nameless narrator comes to gather) squarely laid at her door. Potentially she doesn’t help herself by fashioning dolls and Blair Witch-style ornaments which she leaves on doorsteps and tucked up into haylofts (the villagers collect them all up and bury them in a hole by the river).

But all of this feels like background to our nameless narrator’s perambulations. The perambulations are really the thing. This is a book in love with its nameless narrator’s every sidebar, sidestep, digression and rabbithole:

“…here I find myself wandering again, into the past, which after all is not an explanation for anything, the lines of flight being so various, the question of harm and its reproduction so unanswerable, the beginnings always beginning again.”

At one point she tells us this story is about her brother, but it isn’t really, it’s about our obedient/disobedient nameless narrator, one minute busy trying to help the townspeople by mucking out a barn and the next caught up in the convolutions of her nagging fussy overthinking:

“I was not from this place, and so I was not anything. I was a nothing, a stranger who was not wanted but who nevertheless imposed herself continually, day after day, a kind of spectral presence hovering at the edges of the life of the town…”

There are hints of the nameless narrator’s ancestral past, odd suggestions as to how her brother has bullied her (or perhaps more) and (gradually) a slight shifting of power between them. There are also references here and there (to Microsoft Teams and Twitter and the like) that jar you oddly and make you realise this odd story is taking place now-ish rather than then-ish.

“I thought of the desert, which seemed to me an ideal habitat, a habitat so full of nothing, replete with it, a nothing that would settle on one’s shoulders and keep one company.”

A book, at least as far as this reader was concerned, to intellectually appreciate rather than love and champion, the one standout takeaway I took away from Study for Obedience was this: if you were not a reader, if you regarded books as dull and shifty things, full of subtle fussiness, but also, at the same time, you questioned your own impulses and, drawn in by the inclusion of this book on the 2023 Booker Longlist, you thought, hmmm, maybe I’m wrong, it seems to me this is the kind of book that would make you think like you had been right to ignore books all along, if they are all like this, fussy, subtle, dull and shifty things, you had been right to give the literary world a miss. After all, there is a big old world out there and life to be lived. Is there time enough in a life that is to be lived to the full for books like Study for Obedience? Probably for some. But not for us.

Any Cop?: Imagine sitting for too long, cross-legged, on a wooden floor, your bones aching, your feet itching, every atom of your being encouraging you to either stand up and crick your back or just, you know, scream. Then further imagine that you learned, as if in a revelation, that you were not sitting on a wooden floor but rather the head of a pin and that someone had written a novel about your every shift and that you were reading the novel as you made tiny shifts to the right and to the left. That, right there, is Study for Obedience.