Cathy Rentzenbrink (2024) Ordinary Time

Cathy Rentzenbrink is described on the cover as a Sunday Times bestselling author. True. It reminds me of a phrase Carl Macdougal copy and pasted onto all of his books. Something from Billy Connolly that described him as a great writer. It you’ve got it, flaunt it. Often now, authors aren’t selling books but brands. Her memoir The Last Act of Love was a breakout hit.

In Rentzenbrink’s memoir she described the devastation of her elder teenage brother being hit by a hit-and-run driver and surviving. She and her family realised it would have been better if he died. Not right away, of course. Some things take time.

Ordinary Time is a liturgical marker in the Anglican Church when there aren’t any many feasts such as Christmas, Lent or Easter.

Ann, the narrator, lives amid the ordinary time of mid-life, middle-class muddle. Her first love was books (as was Rentzenbrink’s) and she worked as a librarian. Tim, the local vicar, didn’t exactly woo her, but he did propose marriage. Her experience up until then was men proposing lots of things and some of them were married.

She took a chance on Tim, moved out of London and moved to Cornwall as a vicar’s wife. She wondered if she’d did the right thing as she had no great belief in God or great love for Tim, who proved to be a disappointment in so many way.

But their son, Sam, is her North Star. Her love for him is everything. Her characterisation is one of her strengths. Sam as a child, however, sometimes seems too wise.

Her love for her brother, Stephen, is also unquestioned. She loves the bones of him is their jokey way of describing their relationship. Her brother also married her best friend, who was also a librarian. So when Stephen has a meltdown and wants her to help, she leaves her home in Cornwall and goes to him.

It also gives her a chance to weigh her life and where she is going.

As a librarian she notes the resonance with Leo Tolstoys’s Anna Karenina as a form of mirroring.  Her dad killed himself by flinging himself in front a train, which derailed Ann and Stephen’s life. And on her trip from Cornwall to London she meets the love of her life, Jamie, a military man, when someone flings themself in front of the train they are travelling in.

When she meets Stephen again at a dinner party thrown by her brother their relationship seems fated. But Ann has no great belief in that sort of thing. Especially for married women like her.

Her ambivalence about her feelings and her family life, what she can expect and, indeed, deserves is the burning core of the book. Quietly she goes about her business. It feels right and true. I was impressed and will now read her debut novel. Read on.  

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6