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Sarah DunantSarah Dunant
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BiographyNovelist, broadcaster and critic Sarah Dunant was born in 1950, and was educated at Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, London, before reading History at Newnham College, Cambridge. She worked as an actress and began working as a producer for BBC Radio in 1974. A former presenter of both Radio 4's 'Woman's Hour' and BBC Television's 'The Late Show' which included, until 1997, the annual broadcast of the Booker Prize for Fiction ceremony, she is the author of several novels. She is the creator of private investigator Hannah Wolfe, featured in Birth Marks (1991), Fatlands (1993), winner of a Crime Writers' Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction, and Under My Skin (1995). She is a patron of the Orange Prize for Fiction and reviews for various newspapers and magazines including The Times and The Observer, and is a regular presenter of BBC Radio 3's 'Night Waves'. Her novels include Transgressions (1997) and Mapping the Edge (1999), both of which are being adapted as films.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Crime, Fiction, Non-fiction
BibliographyExterminating Angels (with Peter Busby as Peter Dunant) André Deutsch, 1983 Intensive Care (with Peter Busby as Peter Dunant) André Deutsch, 1986 Snow Storms in a Hot Climate Michael Joseph, 1988 Birth Marks Michael Joseph, 1991 Fatlands Hamish Hamilton, 1993 The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate (editor) Virago, 1995 Under My Skin Hamish Hamilton, 1995 The Age of Anxiety (editor with Roy Porter) Virago, 1996 Transgressions Virago, 1997 Mapping the Edge Virago, 1999 The Birth of Venus Little, Brown, 2003 In the Company of the Courtesan Little, Brown, 2006
Prizes and awards1993 Crime Writers' Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction Fatlands
Critical Perspective‘Funny how time flies when you’re breaking the law’, observes feminist private eye Hannah Wolfe as an aside to the reader, when (as usual) illegally entering a house to gather evidence during Birth Marks (1991). Sarah Dunant is a witty and ‘knowing’ crime thriller writer, especially in her highly entertaining trio of novels featuring Hannah, which continues with Fatlands (1993) and Under My Skin (1995). Though the manner when addressing readers is often cynically humorous, the action is serious, underpinned by discussions of moral and current affairs issues. The subjects of the three novels are respectively surrogate motherhood, animal rights and experimentation, and cosmetic surgery. There is a background rationale for Dunant’s unusual mix of genre fiction and issues. She is also a cultural critic, having edited books of essays, for instance on the ‘Political Correctness’ phenomenon, and for a number of years presented ‘The Late Show’ and ‘Nightwaves’ on television and radio, chairing intellectual and ethical debates. Dunant’s more recent thrillers Transgressions (1997) and Mapping the Edge (1999) are psychologically darker in tone and more overtly sexual, winding up a tensely menacing atmosphere with plenty of plot twists along the way. Their sexual politics are also not straightforwardly feminist: though in both novels the female victims fight back against their male aggressors, they develop a perverse kind of relationship with them. The women in Dunant’s fiction take chances, and have to live with the consequences.
Hannah Wolfe is a delightful creation, and she is so chatty that we as readers really get to know her. She enjoys combative relations with on-off boyfriends and her boss Frank (who tells her ‘you’re too political for this business’), and has to deal with the perennial sexism of the policemen she encounters. Integral to the books is that personal loyalties and relationships, especially with her married sister Kate and children, are as important as the thriller elements. The books pay homage to past masters of crime writing. Birth Marks for instance concludes with a Simenon-like statement that ‘it was a question of degree of corruption, morality as a rubber band, everyone rejoicing in its elasticity’. Hannah’s wisecracking world-weariness recalls Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, and like them she regularly turns down bribes, takes risks with her personal safety and tries to stay one step ahead of the police. She is also a kind of meta-fictional narrator, able to assure us: ‘After all, in the end what are lies but the stuff that plots are made of?' Dunant’s books abound with references to books, television cop series and movies. Pop and rock music also have a role to play, the chapters in Fatlands being ironically titled after rock songs: in ‘Dancing in the Dark’, Hannah is savagely beaten up at night.
Birth Marks is an apparently simple case which gets ever more complex: a young dancer disappears and is found in the Thames, dead and eight months pregnant. Hannah follows the trail of clues to France, meets a man she is attracted to (‘very Jean Paul Belmondo’) and is abducted to the Belmont family chateau, where she conducts a lengthy debate with the patriarch about the ethics of surrogate motherhood. In Fatlands Hannah is hired to chaperone a bolshy teenager, daughter of a research scientist, and comes under great danger during her investigation of the Vandamed corporation’s animal experimentation and genetic engineering programme. But she has to balance the competing moralities of multinationals and animal rights extremists, as the action builds towards a horrifying climax. Hannah ends up in a pig-shed full of animals awaiting slaughter, and her attacker re-appears, wielding an electrical stun gun. The most purely enjoyable book of the three is Under My Skin (1995), in which Hannah is sent to investigate a series of sabotage incidents at a Health Farm. After surviving the regime of starvation and pampering by ‘G5 Massage Pads’, Hannah has to find the savage killer of a Harley Street cosmetic surgeon. In the course of the action she discusses issues surrounding women and their bodies, comes to terms with her own ageing but has to conclude, as ever, that ‘The baddies are never quite the ones you want them to be’.
‘Language and sex. Always a challenge for the translator’, reflects Elizabeth in Transgressions, alone in the house after a bitter split with her boyfriend, and translating a hard-boiled Czech thriller with disturbingly sadistic sexual scenes. A serial rapist is at large in her London neighbourhood, and the tension begins when a favourite Van Morrison CD goes missing, followed by a number of creepy incidents. The two narratives, from her book and in her life, start to move in parallel before she confronts a figure appearing in the darkness at the end of her bed. When the police are baffled she is forced to go after the Holloway Hammer Rapist herself (‘simple rules of the genre’). A similar device of parallel narratives operates in Mapping the Edge, but these are kept separate until just before the climax. Journalist Anna goes missing when about to fly home from Italy. She wakes from being drugged and is surrounded by photographs of a man’s dead wife, whom she resembles and whose clothes she is forced to wear. In another narrative thread, we follow Anna’s investigation of a mysterious lover whose story about being an art dealer isn’t quite what it seems. Meanwhile, at home, her friend Estella and young daughter Amy try to work out what has happened, and form their own relationship. These threads are eventually brought together, revealing what was true and what was a Hitchcock-like ‘MacGuffin’.
Dunant’s novel, The Birth of Venus (2003), is set in late 15th century Florence, and initially appears to be a departure from the crime thriller. But a series of gruesome murders of prostitutes and their clients are taking place in the city of the Medici, now ruled by fundamentalist preacher Savonarola and his followers and ravaged by the plague. Young Lucrezia, assisted by her black slave and confidante, Erila, takes on the role of detective. She becomes the wife of a prominent homosexual politician and art connoisseur, learns to paint frescoes, and discovers the joy of sex when a handsome foreign painter joins her father’s household. Her story is framed by political and religious upheavals, and the events of years later, when, as nun Sister Lucrezia, she meets the painter again and re-discovers ‘desire, like a dragon’s head lifting from slumber’. Once again, personal relations loom as large in the book as action, as she engages with new Renaissance ideas about art, the body, and women’s lives. Lucrezia finds fulfillment in the Convent of Santa Vitella, ‘a republic built if not on virtue then on female creativity’. Hannah Wolfe would certainly have approved.
Dr Jules Smith, 2004
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