The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine

Meet Frankie, Miriam and Bronagh: three very different women from Belfast, but all mothers to 18-year-old boys.

Gorgeous Frankie, now married to a wealthy, older man, grew up in care. Miriam has recently lost her beloved husband Kahlil in ambiguous circumstances. Bronagh, the CEO of a children’s services charity, loves celebrity and prestige. When their sons are accused of sexually assaulting a friend, Misty Johnston, they’ll come together to protect their children, leveraging all the powers they possess. But on her side, Misty has the formidable matriarch, Nan D, and her father, taxi-driver Boogie: an alliance not so easily dismissed.

Brutal, tender and rigorously intelligent, The Benefactors is a daring, polyphonic presentation of modern-day Northern Ireland. It is also very funny.

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The Benefactors is a novel about the sexual assault of a young woman by three of her supposed friends.  I have to admit that I didn’t love it and I disagree with the above blurb – I didn’t think it was “very funny”, nor should it be for the subject matter – but I found it to be highly original and I appreciated the way it handled Misty’s assault and complexity involved in such cases.

The novel is told from a huge number of perspectives.  There are five main points of view – Misty, her adoptive father, Boogie, and the mothers of the three boys – but also a huge range of other voices.  While this polyphonic style won’t suit everyone, it gives a strong sense of the community and we see a broad range of reactions once the event becomes common knowledge.  There are sympathisers, detractors, and everyone in between. It feels realistic as everyone has an opinion and something to say, and it forces the reader to consider their own perspective and reaction to Misty’s assault – who do you agree with and who is judging too harshly?

My favourite character in the novel is Boogie.  One of the few characters who is fully fleshed out, we see how he puts his own life on hold when his daughter and her half-sister, Misty, are dumped on him by their mother.  There’s an element of role reversal in Boogie’s character as he sacrifices everything for these two children – still something that we expect from mothers more than fathers – despite having no obligation to Misty whatsoever.  Boogie’s reaction to the assault is endearing – he doesn’t know what to do, but tries to make their home a safe, comforting place for Misty as they work through the aftermath. 

Boogie aside, Erskine lets the women of this novel come to the fore, and we don’t hear from the boys – Chris, Rami, and Lyness – directly, seeing them only through the eyes of others.  The three mothers are interesting characters, although the only likeable one is Miriam, particularly as the reader understands that this is the second tragedy to befall her in a short space of time.  Frankie is the most interesting and complex of the three. Growing up in care, she’s married into money, taking on two step-children in the process. Unlike Boogie, she seems to resent this, and comes across as cold and unfeeling throughout – she doesn’t appear to care for them at all, even as her step-daughter makes some very unsubtle cries for help. Despite this, I felt sympathetic towards her, particularly as more of her background was revealed.

I think that Erskine tackles the complexity of sexual assault cases really well.  Misty can’t remember exactly what happened and when (a valid reaction) and the lines are blurred as we come to understand that some, but not all, of what took place may have been consensual.  It’s both infuriating and predictable as Misty’s character is subjected to scrutiny – some think she was asking for it, some think she’s made it up, some pointing out that she had a crush on one of the boys.  It highlights how many ways there are to blame the victim, and it’s noticeable that the three boys aren’t subjected to the same court of public opinion. 

I didn’t like the resolution of the assault.  I don’t want to give anything away, but I guess I was expecting Misty to take on the three boys despite the odds.  She doesn’t.  The outcome that’s reached might be pragmatic – we all know the stats around sexual assault cases and the chance of these three boys being found guilty is slim to none – but I found it unsatisfying.  For me, the boys – two of them, at least – come out of this unscathed while Misty has to carry this with her for the rest of her life.  She seems happy with the outcome, but I felt it was dismissive of the longer-lasting impact that such an assault can have. 

The Benefactors is a novel that didn’t fully work for me, although others have loved it.  While this is her debut novel, Erskine has had collections of short stories published, and I think that shows through in her writing as some of the points of view work as standalone pieces.  While it’s not a novel that I loved, I think the problem lies with the reader not the book in this instance – it just wasn’t for me.