The Summer of the Bear
Bella Pollen, 2011
Grove/Atlantic
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802145888
Summary
With her fifth novel, critically acclaimed writer and journalist Bella Pollen takes readers into the private dynamics of a family grappling with the loss of father and husband in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, where between elemental beauty and utter bleakness, strange forces are at play.
In 1980 Germany, under Cold War tension, a mole is suspected in the British Embassy. When the clever diplomat Nicky Fleming dies suddenly and suspiciously, it’s convenient to brand him the traitor. But was his death an accident, murder, or suicide? As the government digs into Nicky’s history, his wife, Letty, relocates with her three children to a remote Scottish island hoping to salvage their family. But the isolated shores of her childhood retreat only intensify their distance, and it is Letty’s brilliant and peculiar youngest child, Jamie, who alone holds on to the one thing he’s sure of: his father has promised to return and he was a man who never broke a promise.
Exploring the island, Jamie and his teenaged sisters discover that a domesticated brown bear has been marooned on shore, hiding somewhere among the seaside caves. Jamie feels that the bear may have a strange connection to his father, and as he seeks the truth, his father’s story surfaces unexpected ways. Bella Pollen has an uncanny ability to capture the unnoticeable moments in which families grow quiet. A novel about the corrosive effects of secrets and the extraordinary imagination of youth, The Summer of the Bear is Pollen’s most ambitious and affecting book yet. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 22, 1961
• Where—Oxford, England, UK
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in Ladbroke, Grove, London
Arabella Rosalind Hungerford Pollen is an English couturier and author. Arabella, nicknamed Bella, was born in Oxford, the daughter of Peregrine Michael Hungerford Pollen and Patricia Helen Barry. In 1981 she founded the fashion design company Arabella Pollen Ltd., running it until 1994. Among her clients were Diana, Princess of Wales; Margaux Hemingway and Marianne Faithfull.
Pollen is also a writer who, as a journalist, has contributed to a wide variety of publications, including The Sunday Telegraph, Vogue, and The Observer. As a novelist, she has published five books: All About Men; B Movies, Blue Love; Midnight Cactus; Hunting Unicorns, and The Summer of the Bear.
Her first marriage was to Giacomo Dante Algranti. In 1995 she married David Maurice Benjamin Macmillan, the grandson of former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. The couple have two children: Finn Joshua M. Macmillan and Mabel Macmillan. They live in Ladbroke, Grove, London.
Book Reviews
Full of vivid detail.... Pollen is an acute observer of people and places.... a skilled dissector of the subtleties of sibling warfare.
Washington Post
Pollen delivers a potent narrative about a family gripped by grief.
Terry Loncaric - Chicago Post-Tribune
There’s magic at the margins of The Summer of the Bear.... The novel has a bit of the style of Lemony Snicket and a smidgeon of The Secret of Roan Inish. Pollen’s writing is clean and clear enough that you can really smell the peat smoke and feel the wind.
Los Angeles Times
Affecting.... Riveting.... A thrilling tale that unravels mysteries of the human heart, The Summer of the Bear is spine-tingling. (4.5 stars)
People
What's real and what's imagined is at the heart of this gem of a novel, which is one part fairy tale, one part international thriller, and all-parts engrossing family drama.... Pollen's lyrical and often witty prose makes this a stirring tale of loss and self-discovery.
Lynn Schnurnberger - More
In the time it took me to finish the first two or three sentences, I was already hooked: the characters, their feelings and their behavior seemed entirely real and true to me.... The Outer Hebrides are so vividly described that I am obsessed with going there for a visit.
Nancy Pearl - NPR
A haunting, unsentimental look at estranged families and hidden secrets.... Magically melancholy.... Tender and wistful, Pollen doesn’t shy away from harsh truths, but at the heart of her story there’s an unquenchable belief in love and redemption
Marie Claire (UK)
In 1980s Berlin, there's evidence that the British Embassy was undermined by a mole, and when diplomat Nicky Fleming dies unexpectedly (was it murder? suicide?), it's easy enough to point the finger at him. Trying to protect her three children, his widow resettles in the Outer Hebrides, where odd but brilliant young Jamie discovers a brown bear while exploring the island with his teenaged sisters. Jamie believes that the bear is somehow connected to his father, and what really happened back in Berlin begins to emerge. A fascinating plot, and now that British author Pollen has two novels in film development, one must wonder whether she is heading for a breakout. With suggestions of both political and psychological tension, this should appeal to a wide range of readers.
Library Journal
Pollen sensitively and intricately takes each family member through painful stages of grief and longing. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
(Starred review.) In her moving, beautifully written fifth novel, Pollen (Midnight Cactus, 2006, etc.) serves up an improbable mix that, on the face, seems as if it shouldn't work. The main strand of narrative is something out of Cold War thrillerdom (whence le Carré): Letty Fleming's diplomat husband, posted to Berlin a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall, dies there.... A shocked Letty, with children in tow, retreats to the Outer Hebrides to sort things out.... [Young son] conjures up a conversation about grizzlies with Dad, an admonition from Mom that "there are no bears in Scotland" and, in good time, some reckonings with the grizzly himself, who is quite a smart and sensitive fellow.... A sensitive and literate story told on several levels, all of them believable—if some of them improbable, too
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Set between the natural wilderness of the Outer Hebrides and the civilization of Bonn and its nuanced rules of diplomatic society, The Summer of the Bear follows Letty Fleming and her children as they struggle to comprehend the sudden death of their beloved husband and father. Begin your discussion by considering the differences between these two settings and how they reflect Letty’s emotional conflicts. Is she better able to understand what happened in Germany away from Germany, or is there something about the Outer Hebrides that clouds her thinking?
2. Continuing with your discussion of setting and place, think specifically about the remote Scottish islands where everyone lies at the constant mercy of the wind, the tides, and lack of daylight. Talk about the influence of the natural world on each member of the family. How do they adjust to this new way of life, both physically and spiritually?
3. When Nicky dies, Letty and the children find a gaping hole at the center of their world. Examine the ways in which the British diplomatic community has shaped their lives and the ways in which, on Nicky’s death, they no longer have a place in this society. Why do you think Letty flees to the Outer Hebrides? What is she hoping to find there? Do you think Letty is fleeing from her life in Bonn or, rather, fleeing toward something in the Outer Hebrides?
4. Heartbroken and bewildered, Letty is left as the head of her family and feels very much out of her depth in this new role. “It no longer felt as if they were a family. More like a collection of damaged souls bound by a set of rites and rhythms over which they had little control—but then maybe that was the definition of a family” (pp. 18-19). Discuss Letty’s thought process here. What do you think the definition of a family is? Is it possible for there to be a fixed definition for something so fluid and so dependent on external forces? How does an event such as an unexpected death like Nicky’s throw the contours of a family into stark relief?
5. Discuss the structure of the novel with its flashbacks and changing narrative viewpoints from adult to children to bear. Did it serve to deepen your experience of the novel? If so, how? What were your thoughts when you understood that the narrator of the “swimmer” chapters was the bear? How long did it take for you to realize this? Were you happy to suspend your disbelief and to move forward with the novel as a magical fable?
6. Talk about Letty’s character. What is it about her that made her something of a misfit in Bonn among the diplomats’ wives? Would you consider her inability to conform as a character strength or weakness? How does it impact her treatment at the hands of Nicky’s former colleagues, and the formidable ambassadress in the weeks following Nicky’s death? How much of this treatment does she bring on herself by not fighting back? Why do you think she doesn’t?
7. Despite his death in the first chapter, Nicky Fleming remains a strong presence in the book. It is his very personal and rigid sense of morality that shapes the story. Discuss his role as a father and as a diplomat. Was he right to flout the diplomatic code by putting family before king and country? Or humanity over the political ideals of his government? Was his decision to protect the island selfish or selfless?8. Discuss whether it is Nicky’s death that shakes Letty more, or the questions that his death raises? Is she more concerned by the fact that he might have been a traitor or that he was not the man she thought she knew?
9. What does their friend and fellow diplomat, Tom, mean by “Hold on to what you believe. That’s all that’s important” (p. 139).
10. Consider the statement, “people tended to sleepwalk through their lives . . . capable only of happiness retrospectively—until something happened that was monumental and only then did life divide into the before and after” (p. 19). One of the book’s themes is that moment before knowing, before life changes forever. The before and the after. Sometimes, as with death, the characters have no control over these defining moments, but at other times they make a conscious decision to change their lives in inalterable ways. Find examples of this throughout the novel and talk about the way the characters can mold their own lives by stepping willingly into the “after.” Is it sometimes preferable to be in an “after” moment where one can begin to move forward and heal rather than to remain stuck in the unpredictability of the “before?”
11. Letty spares Jamie from attending his father’s funeral, and spares all three children her tears and the talk. Instead she “turns turtle” and retreats into silence. At what point does her protection of the children turn into doing them harm? And what about herself? Is she helping or harming herself? Why do you think she is so afraid of talk?
12. The author writes beautifully on the ways in which families work and is especially sensitive to the ways in which families communicate—or don’t. Discuss the importance of the theme of “communication” throughout the novel starting with Nicky’s statement, “Almost everything that goes wrong in the world is due to people not knowing how to talk to each other.” Find instances of Letty and her children failing to communicate with each other.
13. Alba, the middle child, bristles with anger throughout the novel, furious that secrets are being kept from her by her mother and her older sister. “She eyeballed her mother willing her to answer all the suspicions she didn’t dare voice.” How is her adolescent fury a means of communication? How does her mother react? What is Alba really hoping for? After Letty finds out about Alba’s shoplifting spree, she is roused into anger for a moment and then she and Alba return to the status quo with the silence between them “stretched long and shrill.” What are your feelings for Letty as she fails her daughter, as the seeds are set for potential tragedy?
14. Alba lashes out at life around her, stealing from the local shop because she believes that life owes her—although shoplifting “couldn’t add up to the debt that life was obligated to pay her” (p. 200). Do you understand what she means by this? Can you empathize? Would you say that this feeling of discontent reflects a growing trend in our society?
15. Talk about Georgie, the oldest child. How would you describe her character? Discuss how the knowledge of carrying secrets affects her and changes her. How does she grow up during the course of the novel? How far would you say this sentence describes Georgie’s role in the family? “As always it fell to Georgie to bridge the gulf between her mother’s pretence at normality and her sister’s mutinous rebuttal” (p. 38).
16. Consider the elusive quality of truth in the novel. How far does Letty want to go in her pursuit of the truth behind Nicky’s death? Does she really want to know the truth, or instead a truth she can live with? Discuss the place of truth in Bonn’s diplomatic society life, set against the backdrop of the Cold War.
17. Continuing your analysis of truth—or approximation thereof—throughout the novel, turn your thoughts to Jamie Fleming, Letty’s youngest child. Jamie lives in a world of his own making, an amalgamation of reality and fantasy strung together from the hints, stories, and off-hand comments of others, especially his parents. How far would you agree that his parents are responsible for perpetuating his inability to live in the real world? Is this harmful to him? Why do you think they constantly protect him from the truth?
18. In many ways, through the character of Jamie, the narrative questions reality: Is it something that we all conspire to agree on in the adult world? Talk about the narrative as a search for what is real. Is it possible that Jamie with his childish honesty, his lack of irony or sarcasm and his literal view of the world, has the least distorted version of reality?
19. In a magical collision of reality and imagination, Jamie believes that the lost bear is his deceased father, seeking out his family. Discuss the ways in which Jamie comes to this conclusion—and why it appears to be so obvious to him. How effective was this fable-like binding of magic and reality? Do you agree with Jamie’s thoughts, “Why was he the only person who believed in anything? Why was he always the only one not to succumb to the epidemic of hopelessness? Were faith and optimism things that disappeared when you grew up?” (p. 185)
20. Nicky’s determination to honor his promises to the children accounts for Jamie’s conviction that his father will return to him. This is turn leads to Jamie’s belief that his father has come back in the form of the bear. Do you feel this promise saves Jamie’s life or puts his life in danger?21. It is left up to the reader to decide whether the bear truly is Nicky or whether the connection is a figment of Jamie’s imagination. For those who believe that Nicky does in some way reappear to keep his pledge to Jamie and save the life of his son, discuss whether Nicky can be deemed to have kept his promise to each member of his family and how this ultimately allows them to find peace.22. Consider the children as a group and talk about the ways they react to their new post-Bonn life. A review for this novel refers to the children as “underparented”—would you agree with this description of them?
23. “Everyone has a place where they fit into their skins, a place where they are able to make sense of the world, and the island was hers.” Discuss the moment when Letty realizes that while this may be her home, her moral compass, it is certainly not that of her children’s.
24. “Everything and every event is pervaded by the Grace of God” (p. 181). What do you think Nicky means by this, and why did he leave it with the details of his “betrayal”? How true do you think it is?
25. While charting the family’s separate journeys into grief, the author also manages to infuse the novel with a fine sense of wit and humor. Find elements of light-heartedness throughout the story and discuss its place within the emotional arc of the narrative.
26. What do the islanders represent? Compare the close-knit society of the islands to that of the governmental community in Bonn.
27. How satisfactory did you find the novel’s conclusion? Would you consider the novel, ultimately, as hopeful? Discuss what might lie in the future for the Fleming family.
(Questions by publisher.)