Trapido

Temples of Delight by Barbara Trapido

StuckinaBook All , , 21 Comments

We all say it often, but it really is true that our bookshelves can hold hidden gems just waiting to be discovered. Back in 2009, Bloomsbury kindly sent me all six of Barbara Trapido novels that had recently reprinted (a seventh novel would be published the next year). I read Brother of the More Famous Jack and liked it a lot – then in 2019 I read Noah’s Ark and didn’t like it much. At this rate I could be reading Trapido for the rest of my life – but I have now read my third, Temples of Delight (1990) and it is my favourite so far. It’s really something special.

Temples of Delight is a coming-of-age novel of sorts, following Alice Pilling from her childhood into early adulthood. She is a shy, clever girl, made nervous by her stutter and by not being widely loved by her classmates. There is a stubborn, determined streak in her – she certainly won’t conform to the mould of the girls around her, though that would perhaps make her life easier. And this only develops when she meets Jem, a nice girl in her class who is a whirlwind of a personality. Her stories of her life, her parents, her relatives are all extraordinary, eccentric and vivid – her parents meeting over a wall after a snowball fight, for example, or her sister Patch meeting Modigliani while shading in her sketch of Michelangelo’s David‘s unmentionable parts. Even her name is a curio – she is called Veronica Bernadette, but nicknamed Jem after P.G. Wodehouse’s ‘jem-sengwiches’.

The opening line says ‘Jem was a joyful mystery to Alice’. She is a joyful mystery to the reader too. It’s very hard to pull off the idiosyncratic, ebullient character, but Jem is a complete success. We observe her with the same fascination that Alice does. For a girl who has lived an ordinary life, with ordinary, kindly parents, Jem is a revelation. It is thrilling to Alice that Jem should even pay her attention.

Alice loved the way Jem talked, even when she couldn’t understand half of what Jem said. It was infectious the way Jem grooved on words.

The opening section of the novel is a wonderful ode to the power of female friendships, even when they are founded on an enigma. I was reminded of Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore and, to a lesser extent, Swing Time by Zadie Smith.

Jem is such a vivid, captivating, brilliant creation that we miss her as much as Alice when, one day, she disappears from Alice’s life. She announces that she must leave immediately, on the next train.

“I’ll write to you,” Jem said again. “Alice, you will always be my dearest friend.”

“What?” Alice called, because she couldn’t catch the words and Jem was getting further away.

“I’ll never forget you,” Jem called out, but the sound of her voice was drowned in a roar of gathering speed.

With Jem gone, Alice has to concentrate on her studies – and she exceeds expectations by getting a place at Oxford University. As a long-term resident of Oxford (now Oxfordshire), I enjoyed the section of the novel set there – which focuses little on Alice’s studying of Classics and more on the strange family household where she rents a room, and the confident Roland who becomes her boyfriend.

I don’t want to say too much about the plot – unlike, it must be said, the blurb on the back of my edition. But it continues with different people and places intervening into Alice’s life, and throughout it all she thinks often and deeply about Jem. She still has with her the dramatic, oddly capable childhood novel that Jem wrote in school exercise books. She refers often to what Jem might think or do in any given situation – there is a feeling that Alice is simply biding time until she meets Jem again. Despite the brevity of their friendship, there is a sense that she is a light guiding the rest of Alice’s life. It is testament to the power of Trapido’s writing that Jem’s light shines bright enough to illumine many pages and chapters after her mysterious exit.

Generally, I am most impressed by novels that are short and spare – that make a big impression in a low number of pages. Every now and then, I am bowled over by a book that does the opposite. Trapido is never in a rush. There are chapters devoted to characters who, in the scheme of things, don’t matter hugely. We delve particularly deeply into the life of schoolmate Flora and her miserly, unkind father and loyally downtrodden mother – indeed, some of the scenes with them are the most memorable and dramatic. Does Flora need to be in Temples of Delight? Not really, but it is all part of Trapido’s leisurely, expansive way of writing this novel. A review on the front says ‘fizzes along at a cracking pace’, but I think the opposite is true. Trapido envelopes us in a world and makes it whole. We move steadily through it, never wanting to increase the pace, taking it all in eagerly.

Alongside this world-building, and her perfectly drawn characters, Trapido is very funny. Her prose is often dry – I noted down ‘The school was not one which attracted bookish girls on the whole, and there was no one in the third form who appeared athirst for a greater understanding of the English Revolution.’ She is witty, often unsparing of her characters, in that mould of delightfully eccentric prose writers like Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Jane Bowles. But she is a little more grounded than they are, a little more accepting of hope and optimism.

I will say that the final third of the novel was not quite as good, in my eyes. I wrote in my review of Noah’s Ark that ‘Trapido writes about sex in a jarring way, with sudden and momentary explicitness’ – that isn’t quite so true, or quite so jarring, in Temples of Delight, but I did find that, tonally, the final sections weren’t quite as successful as the rest. But it doesn’t diminish my love for this book, or the likelihood of finding it on my best books of 2023. I’ve found it hard to do the novel justice. I loved it so much.

It turns out I’ve been reading Trapido’s novels in order, which wasn’t necessarily intentional, and it also turns out that her next book, Juggling, is a sequel. And then her next, The Travelling Hornplayer, combines characters from these books with those from Brother of the More Famous Jack. Will I read them while I remember enough about the characters to recognise the connections? Possibly not, at this rate, but I know that one character I won’t forget is Jem.

Noah’s Ark by Barbara Trapido

StuckinaBook All , , , 14 Comments

Ten years ago, Bloomsbury sent me a set of Barbara Trapido books for review. Ten years ago! And, yes, I read and reviewed (and really liked) Brother of the More Famous Jack back then, but it has taken me a decade to read my second Trapido – Noah’s Ark (1984). And I’m still rather unsure what I thought about it.

My first thought, as I read the opening, was how good the writing was. Here is most of the first paragraph, which I’m going to quote at length because I think she does such a good job of throwing you into an intriguing and unconventional world:

Ali Glazer was stitching up her husband’s trouser hems, but had paused to glance up at the kitchen pin board in some fascination. The photograph of a man, bearing a disconcerting resemblance to Thomas Adderley, had been torn from a Sunday magazine advertisement and pinned there by Ali’s older daughter Camilla. The girl herself had had no awareness of that resemblance which now so forcibly struck her mother and had fixed the picture there merely because she liked the man’s collarless Edwardian shirt. The man – in keeping with the clichés of capitalist realism – was manoeuvring a white stallion through a dappled glade of redwood trees and was advertising cigarettes. Ali noticed that Camilla had fixed him rather high on the pin board where he beamed out, as from a higher plane, above the two postcards pinned side by side below him. This hierarchical arrangement struck her as altogether suitable given that she had always elevated and revered Thomas, while the postcards had come from people to whom she felt predominantly antipathetic. 

I say ‘unconventional’, but I suppose Ali’s world is rigorously conventional. It is only her outlook, or the perspective that Trapido gives us, that makes it feel quirky and unusual. I was completely beguiled by that writing, and keen to immerse myself in whatever came after the first few pages – would Ali reconnect with Thomas? What would this mean for her marriage to the benevolently controlling Noah, who obviously doesn’t think that Ali is capable of very much, and mistakes her imaginative eccentricity for something inferior to his rational good sense?

Then Trapido did the thing that so many novelists do, and which always puts me off. We go back into the past. That was one scene in the present, to set a stage that we will work our way too. I never know why this is such a common trope, as I always find it deadens a novel. Oh well, I suppose I’ll put up with it.

We skate back to Ali’s past – between marriages. She has split up with her obnoxious ex-husband Mervyn, and is trying to work out how best to live life as a single mother – when Noah walks into her life, besotted and determined to sort out the disordered way in which Ali has allowed herself to become a doormat. Having seen how Noah treats her in the present day, we do get some benefit of hindsight, as it were, but it also removes some of the tension of wondering what will happen.

And the novel continues to be eccentric. We jump forward in time, or across continents, with very little warning. Trapido’s own eccentric authorial gaze refuses to let us get settled. Her writing style is never unduly odd, and certainly never breaks with the conventions of grammar etc., but the things she chooses to highlight often keep the reader on his/her toes. We spend more time being shown how different characters react to the prospect of head lice than we do to major life events. Everything is slightly off kilter. And I think that’s good?

I have to admit that I was a bit thrown by the novel. That started when one adult character starts lusting after an 11 year old Camilla, openly and in front of others, and nobody says anything. The hints of paedophilia are infrequent and never followed up in any way, but elsewhere, Trapido writes about sex in a jarring way, with sudden and momentary explicitness. And then I found the disconcerting way she puts together sentences and scenes was building together into something I couldn’t quite grasp. Much of the time I really admired it, but it made it difficult to identify the centre of the novel – to have anything concrete to hold onto.

Perhaps it’s a case of needing to be in the right mood for Trapido. I was definitely in that mood when I started the novel, and was loving it. The writing was really wonderful. By the time I finished it, the mood was faltering. Had I read it at a different time, I suspect I’d be writing an unadulteratedly glowing review of Noah’s Ark. I still think she is a richly inventive and unusual writer, but I’m going to be selective about when I start reading her again.

Brother of the More Famous Jack

StuckinaBook All , 10 Comments

Back in the mists of time, Bloomsbury very kindly sent me a set of Barbara Trapido’s novels – which featured in a Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany back here – but somehow I’ve only just got around to reading the first: Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982). I’m afraid the title remained a mystery to me to the end – they do mention that it is in reference to W.B. Yeats, but I’d never heard of Jack Yeats (is that the point?) and I couldn’t see why the title had been chosen… anybody able to enlighten me, do pop your answer in the comments, please.

But that’s by-the-by, really, because I was very impressed by Brother of the More Famous Jack. It is, although I hate the expression and usually hate the genre, a coming-of-age novel. That phrase always makes me shudder and think of ghastly books like The Catcher in the Rye (which we didn’t much like as a whole, remember?) but Trapido’s novel is much better than that. We see Katherine start off as an ingenuous eighteen year old, thrown into the maelstrom of the Goldman household. And since the novel is in the first person, we feel thrown into it as well. Eccentric, forthright Professor Jacob – a ‘creative and inspired grumbler’ – his kind but sharp wife Jane, and their six children (especially Roger and Jonathan, competing at various points throughout the novel for her affection) provide a world of which Katherine has no experience. They are in turns enchanting, frustrating, and bewildering – for the reader as much as Katherine. Katherine herself it is difficult not to like, if only for this: ‘I reverted, as I do in moments of crisis, to rereading Emma, with cotton wool in my ears.’ A sound course of action for anyone, I think you’ll agree. At the same time, Katherine is not a wholly endearing character – more an empathetic one. Watching her grow wiser, we understand rather than adore Katherine.

And aside from the characters, Oxford is often a star of the novel. Although a country bumpkin like me is captured more by the descriptions of the Goldmans’ rural estate, I must admit to being won over by this depiction of Oxford, as experienced by Roger Goldman: Oxford was a place of magical cobbled lanes which led to the sweet-shop. It was a place where tea came with strawberries before the peal of bells for Evensong, where Grandmother, in a Pringle sweater and thick stockings, took one to watch punters from the bridge over the High Street, and where one went through doors into secret gardens with high stone walls. He never came to see it as a place afflicted with too much trad and old stones. He was not, as I was, embarrassed by the idea of privilege. He described to me with an almost hol joy the journey he would make from the railway station, past the litter and grot beside the slime-green canal, past the jail and on into St. Ebbes towards the ample splendour of Christ Church. The middle section of the novel, where Katherine heads off to Rome and a volatile relationship with a jealous Italian, is less successful and at times a little wearing. Trapido is much more successful when back amongst the Goldmans – my only quibble about them is that all their names begin with J. With Jane, Jacob, Jonathan, John and all the various appellations therefrom, it did get a bit confusing… I suppose it was deliberate, and with ‘Jack’ from the title being conspicuously absent… I don’t know. Another potentially interesting angle about which I require enlightening.

Like many of the novels I enjoy, Brother of the More Famous Jack is more about character and style than it is about plot – which makes it difficult to describe or recommend successfully. So I suggest you just pick up a copy and give it a go. It’s not my favourite novel this year and it isn’t cosily enchanting or anything like that, but I might just be inclined to agree with the blurb which claims that, with this novel, Trapido redefined the coming-of-age novel.

Books to get Stuck into:

Dodie Smith – I Capture the Castle: I’ve never actually blogged about it, but this is THE quintessential coming-of-age novel – and the only one before Trapido’s that I’d ever enjoyed. Funny, wise, and I’m even prepared to use the word ‘enchanting’.

Angelica Garnett – The Unspoken Truth: fiction, but heavily influenced by her own life, these four stories evoke the same ingenuousness amongst wry bohemia.