Foxybaby by Elizabeth Jolley

I think I started buying Elizabeth Jolley books because Kim at Reading Matters made them sound really interesting – I bought a few but never got around to reading any under Lisa at ANZ LitLovers said she would be turning to Jolley to celebrate her birthday. I started Foxybaby (1985) then, but it took me a while to finish. And then even longer to write about it.

What an unusual writer, and I honestly can’t decide if I liked Foxybaby or not. It’s a very misleading title – ‘Foxybaby’ is the name of a play that Alma Porch introduces to a group of people at a weight loss camp in a remote part of Australia. It is a residential summer school, supposedly, but people are there primarily with weight loss in mind – the other bits are simply extras. They have many activities at this pricey camp – one of which is putting on a performance, though there are considerable disagreements between Alma Porch and the camp leader Miss Josephine Peycroft. The novel opens with a glorious exchange of letters between the women, which reveal that they are already temperamentally and tonally at total odds with one another. Miss Porch isn’t particularly enthusiastic about going, but cannot turn down the offer.

As she is nearing the destination, this happens…

An ancient bus, once the property of a reputable boarding school for young ladies from good families, still bearing an uplifting motto and emblazoned with crests and colours, travelling in an easterly direction some distance ahead and, because of starting to round the long bend, out of sight, stopped to pick up an elderly woman who was proceeding slowly on foot in the same direction.

The woman, who was dressed in respectable black, Miss Porch thought in the briefest possible time for any thought, must have walked a tremendous distance to be in that remote and lonely place. As she was about to raise a heavy and obviously weary foot to the iron step, Miss Porch, reaching top G, took the first part of the bend in a style suitable for a prima donna and crashed into the substantial fender at the back of the bus.

Her car and another car are badly crumpled in the crash, though thankfully nobody has any serious injuries. It turns out that this is all devised by the ruthless Miles Finch to drum up business for his nearby garage, and the old woman in respectable black has been paid a sum for her services to vehicular collision. Miles pops up throughout the novel and I found him a convincingly infuriating man – caring only about chances of profit, he steals the props and sells them, looks for any opportunity to make charges, and is generally a tolerated thorn in the side of everyone at the college.

Alma Porch is an eccentric character, fixated on Samuel Johnson and incapable of making any sort of utterance you might expect – but she meets her match in a world of eccentric characters. There are the cloak-and-dagger lesbian infatuations between women who don’t seem to much like each other, the dominant older woman who is determined to be in charge of everything, the mother and child who are constantly on the edge of hysteria. There could hardly be group less qualified or less prepared to put on a searing play about drug abuse (for such, unexpectedly, is ‘Foxybaby’). They do their best, and their best is bad. Miss Porch continues in her role, an intriguing mix of helpless and unmoved by the chaos.

Reading Foxybaby was quite a surreal experience. At the beginning, I loved Jolley’s precision with words which I often found very funny. She felt like Australia’s answer to novelists like Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Jane Bowles who write with careful, odd brilliance. But along the way the plot and characters became a bit too stodgy for me, and I never find the introduction of a secondary narrative – here, the play ‘Foxybaby’ – works very well for me. Even Virginia Woolf couldn’t convince me it was a success in Between the Acts, so who else has a chance?

I’ll definitely still read more from my Jolley shelf, but I think I’d prefer her with a slightly less chaotic, overstuffed plot. And perhaps some standout eccentric characters, rather than a cast who are all dizzyingly bizarre. I enjoyed much of Foxybaby, but also wasn’t particularly enthused to keep going at times.

I’ll finish with a couple of sentences that show Jolley’s ability to dive from sublime to ridiculous:

She knew too that this profound despair was a part of the loneliness which accompanied writing. Added to this was the emotional stress of offering a partly-written work to a group of people who were concerned chiefly with losing weight.