Reliving Liz Truss’s sevenweek freefall

This first novel from the Nobel prize-winning poet is a subversive, sophisticated vision of the first year in the lives of twin girls

Famously, she was the first British prime minister to be outlasted by a lettuce. More pertinently for the book industry, however, Liz Truss was also the first to unravel almost faster than a biographer can type. She quit eight days before the Sun’s political editor Harry Cole and Spectator diarist James Heale were due to deliver a portrait already being written at breakneck speed, and for a book to emerge at all in the circumstances arguably represents something of a heroic technical achievement. True, the writing is clunky in places. But nobody will buy this book for its literary elegance; the point is to rubberneck at what remains of the crash site, and if that isn’t what Cole, Heale or most of their interviewees originally intended to deliver – well, life comes at you fast in British politics nowadays.

What emerges is a book of two parts, the second of which focuses heavily on her seven weeks in prime ministerial office and is essentially a Sunday newspaper long read on acid. Most of the clues as to what went wrong, however, lie in the first part, a very readable gallop through Truss’s childhood as the daughter of Guardian-reading, mildly eccentric, leftwing parents, via her political awakening at university – first as a free market Lib Dem, then as libertarian Conservative – right the way through to her stint as foreign secretary, careering round the world in pursuit of the perfect Instagram shot. (It was during this stage that her ministerial “rider” was said to include multiple espressos in a flat whitesized cup and a bottle of sauvignon blanc chilling at every overnight stay.)

I was intrigued by Truss’s mother, Priscilla, who briefly moved to eastern Europe in the 1970s to “try out life under the communists”, took her children on Greenham Common protests and made herself a bright yellow banana costume in which to promote fair trade back home in Leeds. When Truss recalls schoolmates shouting, “Saw your mum in Tesco’s dressed as a banana again,” other 70s children of free-thinking parents may understand her seeming obliviousness to criticism a little better.

Obliviousness isn’t always a blessing in politics however, as becomes clear in her first job as early years minister under David Cameron. Truss had hatched a plan to cut childcare costs by slashing the number of adults required to supervise children, which unsurprisingly proved controversial. Instead of patiently trying to build public and political support for it, she simply put her head down and charged – much as she would a decade later with her minibudget, and about as successfully. All young politicians make mistakes. What’s unusual about Truss is that the lesson she seemingly took from hers was to believe in herself even more, and listen to others even less.

The authors recount sympathetically the well-trodden story of how an earlier extramarital affair with the married former Tory MP Mark Field nearly wrecked Truss’s search for a parliamentary seat, rightly noting the double standard that it never seemed to damage Field. But they also touch on some of the more explosive smears circulated about her during the leadership contest – including claims of an affair with an aide, allegations of predatory behaviour towards staff, and even one wild suggestion that there might be a sex tape of her in circulation. The authors interviewed her twice but their planned third session was canned when she resigned, so perhaps they simply never got to put these to her.

The authors strive to put some distance between them and Truss in their final reflections on where it all went wrong. Putting aside her own fear, reportedly expressed to a visitor to the Foreign Office, that “I am weird and I don’t have any friends”, plausible theories for her implosion include that vaulting self-belief (even in her postresignation speech to staff, she was still insisting she’d been on the right track) and determination to put the wrong people in cabinet.

It’s perhaps significant that she had got away with so much in the past, leading to an overconfidence about her ability to wing it – as she did in the early days of her leadership campaign. If there’s one thing missing from this juicy tale of high political farce, it’s arguably a more unsparing account of what allowed a politician so flawed to rise so high at the expense of us all: a previous leader promoting her to spite his rivals, a dysfunctional Conservative party, but also an indulgent rightwing press that turned on her only when it was too late. Less a drama from “out of the blue”, perhaps, than a car crash waiting to happen.

Liz Truss’s rise and fall as British PM was brutally swift – but not quite fast enough to catch out the authors of this juicy postmortem

When the American poet Louise Glück was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2020, the Swedish Academy commended her “voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. They might have added that she makes the individual female experience universal, joining it to the canon of male mythology in ways even her titles make clear. The Seven Ages, from 2001 – a stunning reflection on human destiny – was preceded by both The Triumph of Achilles (1985) and Ararat (1990), for example, and followed by Averno (2005), named after the traditional site of the entrance to hell. While her earlier work explores family psychodrama, these books portray the emotional violence of mid-life. In 13 poetry collections and two volumes of essays, Glück’s emotional intelligence never surrenders to cosy consolation, yet the writing remains exquisite.

None of this has changed in her first published fiction. Marigold and Rose can be devoured in a single sitting, and that’s probably the best way to enter its tonal world, which is strangely hypnotic, in part because the mood never swings to violent intensity, and in part because of the orderly rhythms of Glück’s prose. Ten short chapters tell us – though not in exact chronological order – about the first year in the life of twin girls, the eponymous Marigold and Rose. During this period their grandmother dies, their mother experiments with going back to work, and they are “distracted, like all babies, by feelings of triumph. First crawling, then walking and climbing, then talking.”

The book might sound limited or even, given its subject matter, twee. Being Glück, it is nothing of the sort. Instead, like her poetry, it gains its force from acute observation. In the final chapter, for example, as the protagonists attend a celebration for their first birthday, “Marigold … looked grimly out at the party from her high chair. Chaos and imprecision, she thought. Grown-ups were milling about … Meanwhile people they didn’t know were touching them and calling them lambs and chickens though it was perfectly obvious they were human babies. Aging human babies, Marigold thought.”

Which is funny, in a wryly goth way. But humour isn’t this book’s endgame. Readers familiar with Glück’s writing will be reminded of the spare poetic diction she developed in her breakthrough second collection, The House on Marshland (1975), with its fine-drawn narratives of family life. As if to underline the resemblance to her verse, each chapter of Marigold and Rose is divided not into paragraphs running discursively from one to another, but into linked blocks of text separated by what elsewhere in her work we would call stanza breaks. These text blocks work rather like the discrete stanzas of a poem. Each acts as a kind of choreographed freeze-frame within the story: juxtaposed, they resemble a frieze.

This way of writing brilliantly evokes the timelessness of early childhood, and indeed of babyhood, before a child has even adapted to her own circadian rhythms. There is that sense of suspension, of living without past or future, which is the superpower of infancy: “Outside the playpen there were day and night. What did they add up to? Time was what they added up to … At the other end of time your official life began, which meant that it would one day end.”

All this creates a subversive vision in which adults are imprisoned by time, and also by

language. And it’s here the author is at her most transgressive, clothing the nuanced reactions of the babies in sophisticated language – even while acknowledging that they don’t have such words. Indeed, only Rose has learned to speak by the end of the book: “Since she had started talking, Rose felt she was turning into a tyrant. And Marigold was quieter than ever … studying the alphabet book for clues.” Readers wedded to realism may find this strategy irritating, but it’s a way to explore the pre-linguistic life of an infant without reducing it to incoherence. And, after all, clothing the hidden inner lives of others with words is what all fiction does.

We learn that Marigold is the smaller, frailer twin, and that the pair started life in an incubator. There are reflections on unity and individuation: punningly, on their first birthday the monozygotic twins wonder how they can “turn one” when they already “had been, Marigold knew. Long ago, when they were an egg.” Rose is a gregarious extrovert, while “next to Marigold’s name there were a lot of needs improvement boxes checked”. But the book isn’t hung up on the occult nature of twinship. Instead, its identical twin girls feel more like a way to imagine two simultaneous versions of the (female) self.

The twins observe each other’s vulnerabilities and triumphs with the protectiveness of allies. This novella offers a tender examination of alternative ways into girlhood, one of which is by way of being a writer. “Marigold was writing a book. That she couldn’t read was an impediment. Nevertheless, the book was forming in her head. The words would come later.” A portrait of the artist as infant twins? I think so. And for this consummate dive into the multiple possibilities of selfhood, we should be grateful.