Sipsworth

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.

“Helen Cartwright was old with her life broken in ways she could not have foreseen.”

At the beginning of the novel, Helen Cartwright is resigned to loneliness and anonymity. She is 83 and moved back to the small town where she grew up. She lives alone and knows nobody in town after living in Australia for 60 years. Haunted by memories of her beloved husband and son, who are both dead, she experiences The Difficulty of Overcoming Grief. These challenges cause her to think of her life as “broken” beyond repair.

“Three years pass with nothing to fill their pockets. Then early one morning, something happens.”

The story’s first part, the Overture, is told largely from an omniscient perspective and in past tense. With the sentence beginning “Three years pass,” the narrative shifts to present tense, and with the sentence beginning “Then early one morning,” the present-day story begins, signifying a momentous change and increasing reader anticipation. The tense and present-day time frame then stay the same for the duration of the novel.

“She ponders the deep sea diver she can now feel holding her entire life in place like an anchor dropped years ago and then forgotten.”

The plastic figure of a deep-sea diver symbolizes all that Helen has loved and lost. Her son David had the same toy as a child, and since she burned all the photos and scrapbooks of her loved ones before moving back to England, it is her first physical reminder of them in years.