Reviews of Pest Maiden
Russell Fairley leads an orderly life as a technician in a blood processing plant. But beneath the mundane surface of his life, all is turmoil.. His girlfriend has left him for a salacious American novelist, Franklin B Fox. Worse, Fox's latest cheese-fest, 'Eating Passionfruit in Bed', contains a thinly disguised and unflattering portrait of Fairley. He reads that when his girlfriend saw him naked, to take an especially cruel example, she 'felt compelled to turn off the light immediately'.
Fairley finds solace with Muriel, a Filipina workmate, and surprises himself by performing an act of heroism at the plant. But in the background lurks the Pest Maiden, the mediaeval bringer of plagues, who even the plant's high biotechnology cannot keep at bay forever.
Rose has written several successful short story and poetry collections, and with Pest Maiden, she has not wholly abandoned these forms. Plot is not fundamental; rather, Rose creates and sustains mood and atmosphere. Fairley is a lens which she uses to focus on dispossession in a bleak version of Edinburgh. And she toys with the novel form itself; interpolating a range of disparate material in the main narrative, including addenda summarising Fairley's psychological state and particular moments and extracts from 'Eating Passionfruit in Bed.'
The author does not aim at closure; rather, by the end of the book she has taken the reader and Fairley through a psychological process which culminates with the intimation that Fairley is growing and transcending his plight, Pest Maiden permitting. Enthralling.
Time Out
An evocative and imaginative writer who plays dazzling games with words... Pest Maiden is a highly original and sharply imagined novel; the unsettling images and voices that Dilys Rose conjures up linger in the mind.
Times Literary Supplement
Blood is the source of life and the vehicle of its destruction. It is what lies beneath the surface of our lives. Blood, the protagonist of Pest Maiden observes, is about as personal as you can get. Dilys Rose's first novel is the drily funny tale of a few days in the life of Russell Fairley, a man with a grievance... the chip on Russell's shoulder is so big that it obscures both the woods and the trees from his vision. He is insecure, self-pitying and petty, yet one cannot help sympathising with him even while he's being given the shaking he requires by Muriel, whose opening pick-up line perfectly sums up her no-nonsense approach to life: 'Get in, you dozy son of a bitch. I'm holding up the traffic for you.'...
Rose writes of blood as 'the endless journey, the ongoing story; genetic saga, mystery thriller, modern romance, social realism, science fiction. Blood picked you out, nailed you down. Blood could damn you or save you. Blood was the ultimate witness.' It's a brilliant extended metaphor, the key to a novel which trawls the space between superficiality and profundity. It takes Muriel, with her experience of repression under the Marcos regime: "so many children were dying from disease while people said the first lady owned 250 bras and 3000 pairs of shoes" - to put Russell's troubles into perspective. Subtly, entertainingly, but with a hint of menace, Pest Maiden evokes the irony which pervades all human life. It manages to be that rare thing, a highly readable novel which is also highly intelligent.
Scotland on Sunday
Certainly contagious, this clever and witty novel may cause something of a literary epidemic of its own this summer.
Sunday Herald
This thoughtful and carefuly crafted fusion of picaresque fiction and dark poetry has a profound point to make...Rose has deliberately juxtaposed the more conventionally acceptable story of humble worth rewarded with a sinister reminder that our surface world of habit and predictability is indeed seriously threatened by increasingly dark forces over which we have no control, or have lost control. The occasional but recurrent nightmare passages of the book, in which we are told of Edinburgh's dark mediaeval understreets, sealed off to keep out the plague, or Russell's horrific dreams of Bosch-like peasants devouring food and each other, and especially Muriel's terrible story, show how thin our veneer of normality is. And once again, in this impressive first novel's lingering intimation of an uncertain future for humanity, let alone nationalities, millenial uncertainty creeps in.
InScotland
Read extracts from Pest Maiden