Blog Tour for ‘Violet’ by Leslie Tate

Violet is a captivating novel narrated through letters, diary entries, instant messages, poems, and other writings that create a multi-textured depth to the storyline. Leslie Tate’s fluid, musical sentence structure, vivid use of imagery and description, and skilful storytelling bring to life a memorable protagonist in the character of Beth Jarvis, an imaginative and sensitive woman. A pleasure to read! – Beth Copeland, Pushcart Prize nominated poet & winner of the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize

Leslie Tate has a beautiful turn of phrase and this work is threaded with elegant descriptive passages. The central characters are instantly likeable, and the reader has a quick and affectionate bond that hooks right from the opening pages. – Dawn Finch Trustee, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) Children’s Writer & Librarian.

The third, free-standing part of Leslie Tate’s trilogy opens with a thoroughly modern scenario: Beth, a middle-aged woman, sits in a restaurant waiting for her first meeting with James, a man of similar vintage with whom hitherto she has exchanged letters and phone conversations.

From that point on, Violet becomes timeless. Events and relationships could be from almost any era. Beth herself is a weaver of stories; the possibility is hard to dismiss that the whole thing is in Beth’s head. In places the author hints as much: “In fact, I could almost say we imagined who we were.”

There’s a dream-like quality to the painstaking precision of much of the description of places, events and conversations. Beth’s love stories – with Conrad first and, in her fifties, with James, are somewhat stylised. “Right from the start we chose to be in love,” she says of James, and there are echoes of Tristan and Isolt, Abelard and Heloise in their story.

Beth punctuates her musings about her men, her families, her illness – in short, about her life – with stories in various forms. Some are contributed by others, some are her own, some are reports of dreams. Beth suggests that the theme of her story is love, but I’d say it’s imagination: where it comes from and what purpose it might serve. In Violet, it gives full value. – David Guest, author and journalist.

At the heart of Violet, there is Beth, a divorced mother of two grown daughters and owner of a café, and there is James, previously married and with two adult children of his own. They are together, right from the opening pages, though in fact the paths of these two characters only intersected later in their lives. Theirs is a passionate love story.

The breadth of Violet is found not in its narrative scope—it is a personal tale with a limited cast of characters—but in how far it reaches inward, and outward. Symbolism and allegory abound, as Beth and James push the boundaries of their connection. They are the couple who dance among the flowers, with or without music, at times literally dancing words. They are the couple who have arrived at a place where the waiting ends.

Told in voices both living and posthumous, Violet is a celebration of the numinous, and a paean to life and love. With James at her side, and in spite of the all-consuming struggles she faces, Beth chooses to embrace a path that is “wild and windy and crazy”, along which the smallest experiences are acts of worship; a world that pulses with life and magic and joy. – Michelle Payette-Daoust, blogger, bi-linguist and teacher 

Violet is the final instalment of Leslie Tate’s Lavender Blues trilogy. It chronicles the passionate later-in-life relationship of Beth and James. A simple love story? Think again. From the very first scene, a childhood story of Beth’s, entitled The Girl who Began Again, we are given a sense that this story will be something unique. We move straight from the childhood story, to an adult Beth sitting in a restaurant with a sheaf of letters sent to her by James. We learn that the pair have been corresponding and talking by telephone and that this would be their first date. Not a bad introduction.

After their successful first date, Tate eschews traditional story telling techniques by going backwards, over the series of pre-dated letters that have led to this point in the story. I wasn’t initially sure about this strategy, surely it would have made more sense to have the letters before the date? However, though the unorthodox decision does quench some of the initial dramatic tension, the letters themselves are fascinating. The move an invitation for the reader to abandon all pre-conceived ideas of what a novel ‘should’ involve.

After divesting us of our expectations, Tate then moves the narrative back and forth between Beth’s childhood and her evolving relationship with James. The various chapters are quirky and unorthodox involving text messages, dialogues without attributions, dreams, stories and poetry, giving one a sense that we are reading not so much a novel, as a real-life scrapbook of someone’s life. Particularly effective are the scenes from Beth’s early courtship with her first husband, an evangelical church minister, juxtaposed against the playfulness and indeed sacredness of her burgeoning relationship with James.

In part two, we skip forward six years, to a series of diary entries in Beth’s first-person narrative voice. She is married to James by this stage and I had similar reservations about the loss of dramatic tension as we looked back over their early struggles as a married couple. Despite this, I found part two the warmest and most endearing part of the novel. Beth is ill, the reader soon learns, her simple diary entries a chronicle of a couple coming to terms with a terminal illness. Their struggles, are chronicled in a quirky, unorthodox manner, which I’m beginning to recognise as Tate’s signature style. There is a loveliness to Beth’s simple spirituality, evoking all that is best in a life of faith. Their return to the rocky headland of their courtship concludes this section in a deeply symbolic manner.

Part three, opens with a letter written by James who is now in deep mourning. It is followed by some third person reflections of the community and then, what can only be described as series of affecting vignettes and stories from the perspective of the recently departed (or is she?) Beth. This section brought the metaphor of a scrapbook forcefully back to me. Perhaps, because I have only just planned a funeral, I was mindful of the fragmentary nature of our recollections. How one person can be different things to different people. How it is only when we pull them together that we can form a complete picture of their life. Which is sacred, in all of its phases, as Beth’s story was. This, I think, is the triumph of Tate’s novel. – Elizabeth Jane Corbett – Bristol Short Story Prize winner and author of The Tides Between.