Sarah Bernstein on new novel Study for Obedience

When Sarah Bernstein moved from the city to the countryside for the first time, she started to take notice. “Things in my surroundings that I normally wouldn’t have tended to,” the novelist says on a video call from her home in northwest Scotland. “There’s something really nice about the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of attention it demands. You’re looking at the same landscape throughout the year and following it as it changes.”

Originally from Montreal, Canada, Bernstein now lives near Ullapool and works at the University of Strathclyde as a creative writing lecturer. In 2021, she published her first novel The Coming Bad Days, a beguiling, sharp portrait of an academic, with indie publisher Daunt Books. The success of her debut – The Coming Bad Days received comparisons to Rachel Cusk and Thomas Bernhard from critics – saw Bernstein move publishing house to Granta for her second novel, Study for Obedience, as well as be named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, a list of British-based-or-born fiction writers under the age of forty that is published once a decade.

Bernstein and I speak a month after she found herself on the list that has previously included literary stars like Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith. “I didn’t know about the list until they told me I was on it,” Bernstein says when I ask how she feels to be part of such a prestigious cohort. “I wrote back to my agent and asked, ‘Are you sure there hasn’t been a mistake?’ Not out of humbleness but because The Coming Bad Days had a very particular and small audience. I never expected to get widespread recognition and I wasn’t looking for it; I just wanted to write my books for one or two people who would read them!”

Being labelled a British author has also sparked some self-reflection. “It’s strange to be interpolated into the British title because I don’t have citizenship in this country,” she adds. “But it is nice to be recognised as somebody who is writing in Scotland.” 

It’s fitting then, that the fraught nature of citizenship and belonging is at the heart of Bernstein’s new novel. Study for Obedience opens with an unnamed woman moving to live with her recently divorced brother in a small, rural community in the country of their ancestors. Unable to speak the local language, the narrator finds herself physically and emotionally isolated, acting as her brother’s housekeeper while he leaves on business trips. Over the course of the novel, a series of strange events – a dog’s phantom pregnancy, a ewe’s unfortunate death, mass bovine hysteria – garners the townspeople’s suspicion for this newcomer.

“I started to write Study for Obedience when I moved from Edinburgh to the northwest of Scotland,” explains Bernstein. “It’s the first time I've lived somewhere that’s not a city, and I was interested in imagining what the dynamic would be if you moved to a small place where somebody has an idea of your background but you’re not quite legible.”

Although Bernstein’s new home inspired aspects of the psychological rural isolation the narrator experiences, Study for Obedience is set somewhere in Eastern Europe, although it’s never specified where exactly. “I was interested in what it means, as the descendent of people who fled the Holocaust, to try and return to the place of your ancestors, or a homeland,” says Bernstein. “A couple of years ago I looked into getting ancestry citizenship to Poland because, although the borders have moved, that’s the place where I could get citizenship on the basis of where my grandparents are from. But it was really challenging because they don’t have the right documents and the archives have been burned. I wanted to connect personal experience to a wider historical experience. I think interior narratives are always historical and political in the sense that they’re a specific expression of history and politics.”

In Study for Obedience, much of the tension between the narrator and the townspeople is due to a difference in religion and ancestry: she is Jewish and the townspeople are mostly Christian. “When I was in high school, there was a trip students went on called the March of the Living,” says Bernstein. “I never went on it because it’s expensive, but they go to eastern Europe and tour around concentration camps. I remember when they came back and said that the villagers there hated that they came, and spat and threw stones at them. I was really surprised because we’re sold a narrative of World War II that these are wounds that have been resolved. But what’s it like for people, who are the descendants of the collaborators or the perpetrators or the bystanders [of the Holocaust], when people come back to this place that they never left?”

Unable to speak the language of the townspeople, the novel’s narrator attempts to find alternative, non-verbal ways of communication. She weaves dolls from dried rushes and leaves them around the town, to disastrous consequences. “The dolls come from the narrator’s newfound connection to the landscape around her.” says Bernstein. “She’s looking at the landscape as something related to her life that she wants to connect with, but can’t identify: the plants are mysterious and the land has no name because she can’t speak the language. There’s some ambiguity as to why she leaves the dolls for the townspeople. Are they really meant well? What is she trying to communicate to them? There’s a weight of history behind them.”

Study for Obedience is a short novel, told in a claustrophobic first-person narration as the narrator recounts the events of a year. Bernstein’s sentences are long and lyrical and much of the novel began as pieces of poetry. “I think language is my primary interest as a writer, even more than story,” she explains. “I’m really interested in voice and when I write, I work by sound: the sound of a line and the sound of voice. It takes me forever to write anything because the order of the words has to be right. It’s almost like hearing a musical phrase that sets the tone of whatever the line is and then I carry on writing with that.”

When I tell Bernstein that I often re-read sentences in the novel multiple times to parse the narrator’s meaning, she seems pleased. “We’re so used to blowing through books and books being highly readable. Experimental writing or 'difficult' writing doesn’t give up its meaning easily, things are immediately evident, and that requires slower engagement. I wanted to underscore how meaning is often misconstrued in communication, or [is] not always immediately evident.” 

In relation to both her family and the world around her, the novel’s narrator is obsessed with obedience and self-discipline. She attends to the needs of others to extreme lengths of self denial. Study for Obedience opens with an epigraph from the artist Paula Rego – “I can turn tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time” – a thematic dichotomy explored through the novel. “I wanted to know what would happen if obedience became a form of control,” says Bernstein. “If there was a way to acknowledge agency in [obedience], and not just think that this character is without any agency. She’s somebody who understands herself as complicit in a web of relations.”

When I ask if the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic inspired this interest in the connection between care and control, Bernstein pauses to think. “Maybe not on a conscious level, but I see that connection: the way control of a population became necessary for the overall health of that population. When you have state intervention into the intimate lives of people on an unprecedented scale, whether that’s housing, healthcare or social work, there’s going to be things that tip too far onto the side of control. I did my PhD on the writing of women in the welfare state and became interested in the twin mechanisms of care and control and how it seems almost unfathomable to balance them.”

As our conversation comes to an end, we return to the relationship between language and power. A startling, memorable moment in the novel involves the narrator interacting with a townswoman whose dog has become pregnant much to the owner’s chagrin. “What’s the power of storytelling?” asks Bernstein. “It’s when she sees it working in the real world, that she discovers there’s power in narrative. She’s never experienced anything like that before because her words have never had any power. Language takes on an almost supernatural force.”

---

Study for Obedience is out on 6 Jul with Granta

Find Sarah Bernstein at The Ceilidh Place, Ullapool, 7 Jul; Golden Hare Books, Edinburgh, 12 Jul; Good Press, Glasgow, 13 Jul