Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

‘Life is very long, when you’re lonely.’

(The Queen is Dead, The Smiths)

'All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?'

(Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles)

Whenever I teach An Inspector Calls at school, I show my students a trailer for Carol Morley’s Dreams of a Life, a documentary about a woman named Joyce Vincent. Vincent was a woman found dead in her flat three years after she died. The smell had grown so repulsive that her existence could no longer be denied. Throughout the film, her friends and former colleagues reminisce on a woman they describe as talented and beguiling (her family are conspicuous in their absence). Essentially, what Joyce’s life teaches us is people can fall between the cracks. If someone moves to a city for a job, they may not have family nearby; if they’re single, the closest contact they have is with colleagues. With agency work and short-term contracts, bonds are hard to forge. Vincent’s life is a warning to look after the young as well as our old. There are befriending services for the elderly, but nothing for young adults. It’s only in the last ten years when pensioners have felt able to ‘come out’ as lonely; for younger people it remains taboo.

The newspaper report on Joyce Vincent.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the 2017 Costa Book Winner by debut novelist Gail Honeyman. Honeyman began the book after turning forty; her jobs up until that point had been in the Civil Service and university administration- back office stuff as opposed to the creative work of fiction. On reading about how a young woman went from Friday at 5 to Monday at 9 without speaking to anyone, it got her thinking about loneliness. During her lunch breaks and free time, she wrote the book that was to become the subject of a bidding war – it's subsequent success has seen it ‘optioned’ by Reese Witherspoon, with the actress rumoured to play the lead.

Eleanor Oliphant is a woman that has a routine office job and a routine life.

From Monday to Friday, I come in at 8.30. I take an hour for lunch. I used to bring in my own sandwiches, but the food at home always went off before I could use it up, so now I get something from the high street. I always finish with a trip to Marks and Spencer on Friday, which rounds the week off nicely. 

From the opening pages, Honeyman constructs a character where order is the thing. Her arrival time is the same. Her lunchtime is the same. Her week’s end is the same. There’s subtle commentary here too on the travails of singledom: the food going off before it could be eaten. Many single people can empathise with this: supermarkets hardly have individuals in mind when it comes to their supersize packaging. However, everything 
seems fine here. There’s no problem with one’s life running to clockwork; it provides control in a chaotic world.

The first sign that everything may not be completely fine is the expository information on Eleanor’s job:

I had a degree in Classics and no work experience to speak of, and I turned up for the interview with a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm.

An unusual heroine has been established. The university education connotes bookish intelligence, but the blank, carefree description of her physical injuries implies a lack of emotional awareness. Why wouldn’t you postpone your interview if you’d been subjected to a heinous beating? Over the course of the novel, we’ll learn that the Classics degree is ironic: she can neither read the past, nor connect it to the modern day.

The blink-and-you-miss-it revelations into Eleanor’s past means the full scale of her trauma is postponed to later in the novel. Instead, earlier sections have a sitcom feel to them with Eleanor- socially naïve- visiting the doctors; (Reason? Back pain. Eleanor’s diagnosis? Breasts. ‘You see, I’ve weighed them, and they’re almost half a stone combined.’) the beauticians (misunderstanding her Hollywood, she complains, ‘I am interested in a normal adult man. He will enjoy sexual relations with a normal adult woman. Are you trying to imply he’s some sort of paedophile’) and ordering a pizza (‘The flaw with the pizza plan was the wine. They didn’t deliver it, the man on the phone said, and actually sounded quite amused I asked.’) 

Simply, Eleanor hasn’t been given the co-ordinates to navigate the world. After a few chapters it becomes clear that Eleanor isn’t suffering from a learning difficulty; it isn’t nature that’s made her awkward, but nurture. When a social services visitor comes round at the end of the first section, we discover there’s darkness behind the laughs. From hereon, Eleanor isn’t to be laughed at as ridiculous, but cheered on as resilient.

Eleanor’s upbringing is strange; consequently, her behaviour is too. When she falls for a musician at a gig, she fantasises over their life together. Her head-in-the-clouds obsession of him is one feature of the book. Counter to this is a down-on-the-ground moment that has a huge impact on the story. One day when a colleague Raymond walks out of work with her, they find an old man sprawled outside; with his head cracked and consciousness scrambled, they have to move fast. Raymond takes control whilst Eleanor panics about ringing 999. This intervention in someone else’s life will change her own.

By the end of the novel there will be more details about Eleanor’s past; what’s more interesting though is where she's heading. You see, Honeyman’s story is a call-to-arms, to embrace the Eleanor Rigby/Oliphant’s of this world with the attention they deserve; to bring them out of their cocoons into a butterfly world of soaring possibility. 

By looking at the lonely people, the affliction can be beaten, the disease cured. It's not ok in a civilised society to ostracise a colleague because they're different, to forget a child because they're quiet, to ridicule someone because they're on their own. In a population of plenty, it's important to remember loneliness is real and here.

All the lonely people

Where do they all belong?

They belong here with you and me, together in community.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is out now.