Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein review – a masterly meditation on life as a survivor
One of Granta’s best young British novelists of 2023 weaves an unsettling tale of abuse, prejudice and blame told by the ficklest of narrators
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In the years since #MeToo, an outpouring of fiction by writers such as Emma Cline, Sophie Mackintosh and Rachel Yoder has grappled with what it means to be a victim, and what it takes to be an abuser. Montreal-born, Scottish-based author Sarah Bernstein’s second novel, Study for Obedience, spins a carefully woven web of culpability and criminality – of which gender is one fine thread – in answering its central question: if attacks on minority groups are unrelenting, in what ways do those groups internalise blame?
“I knew they were right to hold me responsible,” professes Bernstein’s unnamed narrator at the outset. “They” are the native residents of an unspecified remote northern country where her entrepreneurial elder brother lives in a lavish, former gentry-owned manor house. After his marriage breaks down, she drops everything and travels to be at his beck and call. The crime of which she stands accused is begetting a series of local environmental catastrophes on her arrival: a dog’s “phantom pregnancy”; a depressive sow crushing her piglets; and a herd of crazed cattle.
