1980s

Blue Remembered Hills – Rosemary Sutcliff

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There must have been a time – a dark, bleak time – before I was introduced to the Slightly Foxed Editions.  I love the Slightly Foxed journal when I get my hands on a copy, but that doesn’t compare to the bottomless affection I have for all the memoirs I’ve read in their Slightly Foxed Editions series.  Which is, I realise, only five or six – I still have a long way to go.  But the one I finished recently is battling it out with Dodie Smith’s Look Back With Love not only for my favourite SF, but for my second favourite book read this year (Guard Your Daughters has secured first place.)

I need to start condensing my preambles, don’t I?  The book is Blue Remembered Hills (1983) by Rosemary Sutcliff, and it is heartwarmingly wonderful.  The original run of 2000 hardback copies has sold out and, due to its popularity, Slightly Foxed have produced this paperback edition.  Unlike most of the people I’ve spoken to about this book, I’ve never read anything by Rosemary Sutcliff.  My allergy to historical fiction has been lifelong, and her Eagle of the Ninth series has never got nearer than the peripheries of my awareness.  That doesn’t matter in the slightest, in terms of enjoying this book, believe me.

Born in 1920, Sutcliff was quite isolated in her childhood – she was an only child, and (after suffering Still’s Disease when very young) had varying levels of disability, and spent a great deal of time in and out of hospitals and nursing homes.  Yet this couldn’t be further from a misery memoir.  Everything is coated with a fascination for life, and a joy for the possibilities of observing and experiencing.

Like Smith’s childhood memoir, Sutcliff has great fun describing all her relatives – how blessed these memoirists seem to have been with comic uncles and aunts! – and especially her parents.  Her mother seems to have had undiagnosed bipolar disorder – Sutcliff describes times when her mood would change for days without warning – and this understandably made her unpredictable to live with.  This was coupled with a difficult personality, and Sutcliff (though generous to her) clearly didn’t have an entirely easy mother/daughter relationship.  Her father (a sailor) spent long periods away from home – all in all, not a simple childhood for young Rosemary.

But, as I say, she finds the beauty and joy in this all – not by ignoring her difficulties, but by maintaining an optimistic attitude.  Indeed, it wasn’t until I sat back and put together the information Sutcliff gives about her parents that I realised the difficulties she faced.  In Blue Remembered Hills this sort of excerpt represents the tone with which Sutcliff recalls them:

He was a lieutenant when he and my mother were married.  The had first met when they were both fourteen, at a mixed hockey match, and he always claimed that the first word he ever heard her say was ‘Damn’, which I suppose, to judge from her vehemence in protesting that it was the first time she had ever said it, was quite a word in those days.  My father’s invariable retort – oh, the lovely ritual changlessness of family hokes and traditions! – was that for a first time, she said it with remarkable fluency.
I think my favourite thing about childhood memoirs is the revelation of family jokes.  It makes the reader feel, at least for a page or two, that they’ve been inducted into the family.  We all have these, don’t we?  And they’re usually senseless and silly, and oh so precious!

Among Sutcliff’s many memories, the ones which most warmed my heart were about Miss Beck’s school.  Education reform has doubtless done much for children’s welfare, but as a side-effect it was removed the possibility of anything as joyful as this:

In a small back room with peeling wallpaper, under the eye of a gaunt elderly maid, I was stripped of my coat, leggings and tam-o’-shanter, in company with twelve or fourteen others of my kind.  And with them, all on my own, so grown up, I filed through into the schoolroom, to be receive, as Royalty receives, by Miss Beck herself, who sat, upright as Royalty sits, in a heavily carved Victorian armchair.

My schooldays proper had begun.

Looking back with warm affection at that first school of mine, I can hardly believe that it was real, and not something dreamed up out of the pages of Cranford or Quality Street.  I suppose nowadays it would not be allowed to exist at all.  Miss Amelia Beck had no teaching qualifications whatsoever, save the qualifications of long experience and love.  She was the daughter of a colonel of Marines, in her eighty-sixth year when I became one of her pupils; and for more than sixty years, in her narrow house overlooking the Lines at Chatham, she had taught the children of the dockyard and the barracks.  She accepted only the children of service families.  Oh, the gentle snobbery of a bygone age; bygone even then, and having less to do with class than totem.  It was her frequent boast that she had smacked, in their early days, most of the senior officers of both services.  Both, not all three, for the RAF was too young as yet to count for much in Miss Beck’s scheme of things.  But I do not think that it can have been true, unless she had gentled greatly with the passing of her years.  For I never knew her to smack anybody during the year that I sat at her feet.
Isn’t that blissful?  There is quite a bit about this school and Miss Beck, who stayed in touch with every pupil she taught (or so Sutcliff claims!) – it is all fairly ordinary, but made extraordinary through Sutcliff’s lovely writing and engaging personality.

In fact, it is the ordinariness of Sutcliff’s life that makes Blue Remembered Hills so difficult to write about.  It is oddly similar to The Outward Room, reviewed yesterday, in being significant not for its incidents, but for the beautiful way in which they are related.  After relaying the activities, thoughts, people and pets of her childhood, Sutcliff relays her early career as a miniaturist (not, she notes sadly, a form likely to win any major notice in the art world) and her first infatuation.  Those are the two important strands in the second half of the book, I suppose, and it continues up to her first literary commissions.  But the events are so much less vital than the tone.

So, yes, it’s another book you have to read to appreciate… but, oh, what a warm, engaging, beautiful book it is.  One of the very few where I cannot bear the lessening pages as I read on – and which I am certain I shall return to time and again.  Slightly Foxed – I don’t know how you do it.  You are my new addiction.  Long may you continue to find memoirs as spectacularly lovely as this!

Others who got Stuck into this:

 “Perfect. My only complaint is that it is too short.” – Leaves and Pages

 “The tone of the book is one of gratitude for life’s blessings & joy at the natural world, her friends, her dogs & her love for her parents.” – Lyn, I Prefer Reading

At Freddie’s – Penelope Fitzgerald

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One of my undergraduate friends at university spent seminars comparing everything – everything – to either King Lear or Ulysses.  It got a little wearying, bless him.  But I seem to have developed the same affliction with Muriel Spark.  So many writers I read seem to have the same slightly stylised dialogue and deadpan narrative, or unusual characters who refuse to comply fully with the accepted norms of conversation and life. Never has a novel felt more Sparkian (yes) to me than Penelope Fitzgerald’s At Freddie’s (1982) – to the point that I kept forgetting that it wasn’t Spark in my hands whilst I was reading.  Oh, and this is no bad thing – quite apart from destabilising my grasp on authorship (Barthes would be proud), it’s a fantastic novel.

In my post on The Railway Children the other day, I mentioned Penelope Fitzgerald as an author I’d intended to include in A Century of Books, and it reminded me that I’ve been wanting to read At Freddie’s since I bought it last November.  I have quite a few unread Fitzgeralds, actually, having only read two (Human Voices and The Bookshop), but the theatrical setting of At Freddie’s meant it was an obvious candidate for the next one I’d pick up.

When I say ‘theatrical setting’, I actually mean ‘children’s theatre school’ – Freddie (doyenne of The Temple School, or ‘Freddie’s’) trains children in a haphazard manner, ignoring the brave new world of television (for it is the 1960s) and doing whatever would best please Shakespeare.  The children are taught egotism and self-importance, and shipped off to play emotive parts in Dombey and Son or King John.  Freddie herself seems to have minimal dealings with them, developing instead the cult of her own personality – for Freddie is a woman.  And a wonderful woman at that – one of the most characterful characters I’ve met for a while, if you know what I mean.

Everyone who knew the Temple School will remember the distinctive smell of Freddie’s office.  Not precisely disagreeable, it suggested a church vestry where old clothes hang and flowers moulder in the sink, but respect is called for just the same.  It was not a place for seeing clearly.  Light, in the morning, entered at an angle, through a quantity of dust.  When the desk lamp was switched on at length the circle of light, although it repelled outsiders, was weak.  Freddie herself, to anyone who was summoned into the room, appeared in the shadow of her armchair as a more solid piece of darkness.  Only a chance glint struck from her spectacles and the rim of great semi-precious brooches, pinned on at random.  Even her extent was uncertain, since the material of her skirts and the chair seemed much the same.
This is how we first approach her, but it doesn’t do her justice.  She is not the sort to fade into the background – more to lure people in, unawares, and charmingly get whatever she wants from them – often in the name of Shakespeare, or following a ‘Word’ she feels she has been given.  A Word of the non-theological variety, you understand – it could be something she overheard, or saw in an advertisement, or not traceable at all, and she shows some dexterity in the way she interprets these Words.

Here are a couple of quotations which do her better justice:

She knew that she was one of those few people, to be found in every walk of life, whom society has mysteriously decided to support at all costs.
and

Freddie herself had fulfilled the one sure condition of being loved by the English nation, that is, she had been going on a very long time.  She had done so much for Shakespeare, one institution, it seemed, befriending another.  Her ruffianly behaviour had become ‘known eccentricities’.  Like Buckingham Palace, Lyons teashops, the British Museum Reading Room, or the market at Covent Garden, she could never be allowed to disappear.
She is indomitable, a little vague, self-aware to an extent – an extent which relies on nobody else reaching quite her level of awareness.  Freddie is a joy – and it’s rather a shame that we don’t spend more time in her company.  She is the pivot of the school, but she shares centre stage with various other characters in At Freddie’s.  Chief amongst these are the two new teachers, Hannah Graves and Pierce Carroll.  Hannah is besotted with the theatre and the mystique of backstage life – although she does not wish to be an actress, she wants to live in proximity to that world.  I could empathise entirely with her!  Carroll is a different matter – and a preposterous, but inspired, character.  He, essentially, is incapable of self-delusion or self-aggrandisement.  He has no ambition or drive.  Carroll recognises – and openly admits to Freddie – that he is not a good teacher, has no gift with children, and would be unlikely to find a job anywhere else.  Freddie takes him on as a teacher simply out of curiosity – and he makes no attempt to educate the children at all, except once, in a glorious paragraph:

For the first time since his appointment he was correcting some exercise
books.  He had not asked for the exercises to be done, but the children
left behind, those who hadn’t got work in the theatre, had decided, for
a day or so at least, to do an imitation of good pupils.  How they
could tell what to do was a mystery, and as to the books, he hadn’t even
known that they’d got any.
And then there are the children.  Primarily Mattie and Jonathan.  Mattie is as self-absorbed as any of the other actors in the novel, given to pranks, lies, and overdramatics, but also with something of Freddie’s gift for being able to talk anybody around.  Jonathan is different.  He is a gifted mimic and a thoughtful actor, often quietly in Mattie’s shadow, but the final, curious words of the novel (you will find) are about him…

Penelope Fitzgerald’s writing style seems to be rather different in each novel I read.  I found her rather stilted in Human Voices, although perhaps I’d changed my mind on reacquaintance; The Bookshop was poignant and quietly devastating. At Freddie’s has that Sparkian sparseness, coupled with a sly wit best shown in the ironic twist to her characterisations.  It’s devastating in a whole different way – an assassination of a character’s foibles in very few words, for example:

He then said he was obliged to be going, for, as a busy man, a necessary condition of his being anywhere was to be on the way somewhere else.  He picked up his coat and brief-case, and then, although he knew that he had brought nothing else with him, looked round, as though he were not quite sure.
Curiously, self-delusion and self-importance are censured from this man (Freddie’s businessman brother) but accepted from those connected with the theatre.  It is, of course, a separate world.  What Fitzgerald does so wonderfully – and it does seem to me quite a remarkable achievement – is to combine two opposing views of the theatre.  She is simultaneously cynical and awed – recognising both the glory and the absurdity of the second oldest profession.

Ed was listening for the immediate and irrepressible gap and murmur from the house which is like the darkness talking to itself.  He caught, alas, only the faintest snatch of it.  Most of the audience, faced with an unfamiliar play, were bent over their programmes.  They could have read them more easily earlier on, but chose to do so now.  They accepted the presence on the stage of the Lords Salisbury and Pembroke, because the play was by Shakespeare and that was what Shakespeare was like.  But they did not expect to be asked to distinguish between one lord and another, unless there was a war or a quarrel, and it was this that was causing them anxiety.
I adore the theatre – watching plays, yes, but above that the idea of the theatre.  It is for that reason that I love reading theatrical actors’ biographies, or novels set in that environment.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful, in an unworldly way, to be in one of those acting dynasties?  Or – like the boys – to grow up in that sphere of extreme emotions and spectacles?  Fitzgerald concedes that – she gives us Hannah, who feels that way without having any aspiration actually to be an actress – but she permits no rosy-eyed or glassy-eyed view of the theatre and its people.  She gives us wonderful characters, she gives us the adorable, inimitable, formidable Freddie, but she knocks over their pedestals and shows how foolish Freddie’s school is – and, yet, how timelessly glorious too.

Gossip From Thrush Green – Miss Read

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The first four or five days I was at home, I had a headache.  It’s related to a tooth problem, which hopefully will get sorted out, and I’ve become a cheerleader for various painkillers and antibiotics this week – but, more to the point, I needed something to read.  I couldn’t cope with anything stylistically sophisticated or experimental, or even anything which could be considered demanding in any sense of the word.  What could I choose?  Well, I’d never read anything by Miss Read, and she seemed to fit the bill.  I have three on my shelf, picked up cheaply somewhere, and so I chose one from the middle of her writing – Gossip from Thrush Green (1981).

Although I had never previously read a word by Miss Read, it was exactly what I expected.  Thoroughly enjoyable, and utterly forgettable.  It’s a little village where everyone knows each other, and cares for each other – the only differences being that some show this care, and some hide it.  Everyone gossips, especially the men, and a mischievous cat is about as traumatic as a burnt down vicarage (incidentally, not the most restful scenario to read whilst sitting in a vicarage!)

It’s been less than a week, and already all the characters and events are fading from my mind… I think the characters recur throughout the series of Thrush Green novels, so other readers might already be fond of blunt Ella, dotty Dotty, kind vicar’s wife Dimity etc.  I liked them all, but – differently though they were described – all of them spoke in the same warm, sensible way.  Miss Read (or Dora Saint, as she was called) writes in a very workmanlike way, getting the job done – which is perfectly good enough, because she clearly isn’t trying to be experimental.  With my headache, I was grateful.  Although set around 1981, when it was published, this was only clear because they talked about decimalisation.  Apart from that, it could easily have been 1950 or 1930 or even earlier.  It’s all bathed in nostalgia.  Villages still have these sorts of friendships and acquaintances – everyone is interested in each other – but they’re not quite so cut off from the rest of the world.

But how could I not warm to a novelist who takes it for granted that we know who the Provincial Lady is?

“‘When in doubt, don’t’, is my motto,” said Ella forthrightly.  “And as for love, well, you know what the Provincial Lady maintained.  She reckoned that a sound bank balance and good teeth far outweighed it in value.”
And how could I not nod my head to this?

“A quarter past three,” she exclaimed, catching sight of the bedside clock. “What a time to be drinking tea!””Anytime,” Harold told her, “is time to be drinking tea.”
All in all, this was the perfect book for me to read this week, but I think I’ll be keeping Miss Read to days when I can’t cope with anything else.  I know she has her besotted fans – Our Vicar’s Wife has read them all several times, I believe – but when I’m after comfort reading I’d rather run back to the 1920s.

The Other Garden – Francis Wyndham

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I had a lovely day at Chatsworth, even though all didn’t go entirely to plan.  I’ll fill you in on all that soon!  (WHAT a cliffhanger!)  For today, let’s fill up one of those surprisingly-less-tricky-than-expected 1980s slots in A Century of Books.

I picked up The Other Garden (1987) by Francis Wyndham because I thought I’d heard of the author (and because it was short, cheap, and sounded interesting) but I must have been thinking of someone else, since this seems to have been Wyndham’s only novel, although he also wrote (writes?) short stories.  It won the Whitbread First Novel Award, and various luminaries are printed on the cover saying that it ‘Comes as close to perfection as you’ll get in an imperfect world’ (Hilary Bailey); ‘Perfectly judged… wry, exact, poised’ (Harold Pinter); ‘A completely faultless piece of writing’ (Susan Hill).  Well… it left me a little nonplussed.  Yes, this is going to be one of those rather uninspiring reviews where I am forced to say “It’s fine, but that’s about it.”

I was, though, rather struck by the opening:

“How soon will lunch be ready?” my father would ask.  Assuming that hunger had made him impatient, my mother would answer with eager apology, “Oh, any minute now – it must be nearly one.”  But she had misinterpreted him.  He had really wanted to know if he still had time for a further look at the other garden before sitting down to the meal.  In dismay, she would watch him put on an old grey trilby hat, choose a stick, pass purposefully through the front entrance, then walk serenely down the short drive and vanish into the open road.  Almost immediately opposite, a painted white wooden door in a red brick wall admitted him to this beloved extension of his property, subtly but certainly separate from the house and its bland surrounding lawns.  Once in the other garden he was safely out of earshot – but a few minutes later I would be sent in search of him with a summons to return, the serving of our good having been innocently hastened by his ambiguous question when what he had hoped for was delay.
This opening paragraph, and the title of the novel (novella?  It’s super short) led me to think that The Other Garden might, indeed, be about this other garden.  Well, perhaps it was a metaphor for something (give me a moment) because it only turned up at the beginning and the end.  In between, it focuses mainly on the Demarest family, acquaintances of the narrator’s family, albeit rather more well-to-do.  Kay and Sandy are the children, Sybil and Charlie are the Demarest parents.  The narrator (who may or may not be named) is focused chiefly on Kay, a young woman who is rather captivating and wilful.

And… I don’t think I can remember much else.  There is a sweet dog at one point.  And Denis (a rather eccentric schoolfriend of the narrator) is shipped off to Switzerland for TB treatment.  He’s odd.  What else?  Oh dear, oh dear.  I only read it recently, and all the details have faded.  It was that sort of book.  If I weren’t recording all my books for A Century of Books, I’d have quietly slipped this back on the shelf, and never mentioned it…  But I did jot down one quotation which I liked.  Sybil generally isn’t a very sympathetic character, but I think a lot of us would raise a glass to this:

“I do believe,” Sybil continued, “that when the history books come to be written it will emerge that the great unsung heroine of these times we’re living through will be none other than that much maligned creature, the British Housewife!  I’m thinking, in fact, of writing a letter to the Daily Telegraph to propose that some promising young sculptor – or perhaps a sculptress would be a better choice – should be officially commissioned to design a statue in her honour, and that the result should be prominently erected in some public place.  I don’t know about you, but I for one am getting sick and tired of looking at monuments portraying middle-aged men on horseback!”
The details of The Other Garden escape me, but I do remember the effect it had upon me.  It’s no secret that I love short books, and I really admire authors who can use 100-200 pages effectively.  But a novella demands its own structure.  The ‘rules’ for that aren’t obvious – indeed, they don’t exist, do they? – but I don’t think a novella should be simply a truncated novel.  It felt like Wyndham’s training at the short story had made him unable to structure a whole novel – I don’t know, it just felt incomplete.  Not terminated too early, but as though it were the skeleton of a different, longer novel.  Somehow not satisfying. Hmm.  My post started fairly vaguely, and it’ll end inconclusively.  It’s probably a warning sign that, a week or two after I finished The Other Garden, I don’t really remember anything about it.  But… don’t forget that Hilary Bailey thinks it ‘comes as close to perfection as you’ll get in an imperfect world.’  So what do I know?

 

Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga

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A friend lent me Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) an embarrassingly long time ago (we’re talking years) and a combination of the appalling cover and the vague, uninviting title meant that I put it off for ages, and then forgot about it.  I finally remembered that I still had it a couple of weeks ago, flicked it open with some trepidation… and was almost immediately hooked.  What is it they say about judging books by their covers – do it or don’t do it?  I forget.

The striking opening line is ‘I was not sorry when my brother died.’  The ‘I’ in question is Tambudzai, who lives with her family in 1960s what-was-then Rhodesia.  They’re in a poor rural community, the poorest members of a large family – they can only afford to send one child to school, and it is Tambudzai’s brother Nhamo who gets this honour.  Tambudzai is desperate to attend school, even growing and selling her own maize to get the fees, but Nhamo tries to assert his masculine superiority at every turn, making Tambudzai miserable.  The reader doesn’t mourn much when Nhamo dies – and nor, it seems, does Tambudzai.  His death takes place in ‘the mission’, where Tambudzai’s rich uncle lives with his wife, son, and daughter Nyasha – and it is here where Tambudzai is herself later taken:

Thus began the period of my reincarnation.  I liked to think of my transfer to the mission as my reincarnation. With the egotistical faith of fourteen short years, during which my life had progressed very much according to plan, I expected this era to be significantly profound and broadening in terms of adding wisdom to my nature, clarity to my vision, glamour to my person.  In short, I expected my sojourn to fulfil all my fourteen-year-old fantasies, and on the whole I was not disappointed.  Freed from the constraints of the necessary and the squalid that defined and delimited our activity at home, I invested a lot of robust energy in approximating to my idea of a young woman of the world.  I was clean now, not only on special occasions but every day of the week.  
Nyasha is about the same age as Tambudzai, but had spent some time in England and adjusted to 1960s English culture, before having to re-adjust back to 1960s Rhodesian expectations.  One of the most interesting aspects of the Nervous Conditions is the contrast (and friendship) between these cousins.  Nyasha (although only fourteen) is considered loose and immoral for wearing short skirts and talking to boys; Tambudzai is keen to adhere to her uncle’s instructions, but is developing her own conscience and personality at the same time.  There is another storyline relating to Nyasha’s well-being which appears rather too suddenly at the end, and doesn’t really work – indeed, the whole ending is surprisingly rushed – but before that, this contrast of characters is really fascinating.  Alongside, there is an equally well-drawn juxtaposition of Tambudzai’s old life and her new life.  Although her parents want the best future for her, they are also clearly a little confused and jealous when she visits with a developing outlook on life.  It’s done very subtly, for the most part, and you can tell that the novel is semi-autobiographical.

Indeed, this is probably one of the reasons I enjoyed Nervous Conditions so much.  If you’ve been reading SiaB for a while, you probably know that I don’t like books set in countries which the author isn’t from, or doesn’t know well.  So if a British author wrote a novel set in Zimbabwe, but had never been nearer than Portugal, or had only been for a fortnight on a package holiday, then I wouldn’t be interested.  Since Dangarembga’s childhood was in fact in some respects like Nyasha’s (it seems), I’m very willing to read her views of her country and people.  Here’s a good example of why:

We waved and shouted and danced.  Then came Babamukuru, his car large and impressive, all sparkling metal and polished dark green.  It was too much for me.  I could have clambered on to the bonnet but, with Shupi in my arms, had to be content with a song: “Mauya, mauya.  Mauya, mauya.  Mauya, Babamukuru!”  Netsai picked up the melody.  Our vocal cords vibrating through wide arcs, we made an unbelievable racket.  Singing and dancing we ushered Babamukuru on to the homestead, hardly noticing Babamunini Thomas, who brought up the rear, not noticing Mainini Patience, who was with him, at all.
Had this been written by an author who had never lived in Africa, it could never have been as natural.  The greeting – so normal and expected of Tambudzai – would have become some sort of spectacle, where the dancing and singing would have been relayed as a piece of research.  I much prefer the sort of novel Nervous Conditions is, where the reader – wherever they live – is immersed in the non-artificial perspective of a local.

Primarily, of course, I valued Nervous Conditions for Dangarembga’s writing.  It is lilting and beautiful, but not overly stylised.  It flows naturally, and gives Tambudzai’s voice perfectly.  My only reservation with the novel, aside from the aforementioned rushed ending, was that it occasionally lost the subtlety which mostly made it special.  I’m all for a feminist message, but sometimes Dangarembga didn’t trust to the show-don’t-tell method (and she should have trusted it, because she excels at it for the most part.  Excerpts like this just felt as though they’d been included for cutting and pasting into high school essays:

[…]Babamukuru condemning Nyasha to whoredom, making her a victim of femaleness, just as I had felt victimised at home in the days when Nhamo went to school and I grew my maize.  The victimisation, I saw, was universal.  It didn’t depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition.  It didn’t depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on.  Men took it everywhere with them.
Not to mention how reductive that it.  Never mind.  Nervous Conditions is a novel, not a treatise, and for the most part Dangarembga achieves this wonderfully.  Not for nothing did it win the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1989.  It’s always a treat when I enjoy a book much more than I thought I would, and I can only apologise to my friend that it took me so long to get around to reading this one.

For Sylvia by Valentine Ackland

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When I started reading For Sylvia: An Honest Account by Valentine Ackland (published posthumously, in 1985) I was rather prepared to loathe the author.  I’ve recently read Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Diaries, and I haven’t come across more heartbreaking diary entries than those concerning the period when Ackland (STW’s partner for decades) decided to move her lover Elizabeth Wade White into their home, while Sylvia Townsend Warner moved out to a hotel, as some sort of experiment.  Although Warner is devoted to Ackland until Ackland’s death, and indeed until her own, she comes across as a selfish, cruel person.  It is perhaps unsurprising that when writing about herself, a more sympathetic portrait is drawn – and the fact that Ackland writes so well swept me along for a lot of it.  Although I have to say, a more miserable portrait than the cover photo I do not think I have ever seen.  I’m not sure a more miserable portrait is possible.  It didn’t make me immediately warm to her.

For Sylvia isn’t wholly an autobiography – it is, as the title suggests, an account of Ackland’s life, written for Sylvia. Having said that, the ‘for Sylvia’ bit doesn’t particularly influence the style or structure – she isn’t addressed as ‘you’ at any point, but remains ‘Sylvia’ – so perhaps it is safest to call For Sylvia a memoir.  In essentials it deals with two broad aspects of Ackland’s life – one being her romantic life, and the other being her battle with alcoholism.

Ackland starts by addressing that which every memoir needs: the pivotal moment of its subject’s life:

The ‘crisis’: it has been laid down that this should grip the reader’s interest, grapple him to the author, and amke it impossible for him to put the book down until he has finished it, or at least impossible for him to return it to the lending library by the next post.  But the ‘crisis’ in this particular life is very difficult to describe; for one thing, it is hard to know whether it happened in a flash or whether, in point of fact, it matured rather slowly and broke, as it were, creamily and in silence.  This ‘crisis’, too, is not directly concerned with a sexual upheaval, which makes it perhaps less enthralling to the reader than it was to the author.  However; it happened, and it was undoubtedly the sharpest possible crisis any life can know, for all it was so quiet and did not so much as cause a ripple on the surface of domestic life.

She is writing of her alcoholism, which had dominated much of her life for 19 years.  More particularly, the crisis is actually the end of this domination.  I know they say you cannot cure alcoholism, but the night in question – 8th October 1947 – was the last time Ackland felt the need for alchol.  Although with very, very little Christian faith at this point (she wavered quite a lot) she prayed to God.  ‘There was no reply.’  And yet, the following evening, after being ill all day, ‘I suddenly realised that I was walking in tranquility and with perfect confidence; and that tranquillity and assurance has never left me.’  I don’t wish to undermine the battles faced by those with alcoholism when trying to stop drinking; I am merely recounting the ‘crisis’ with which Ackland opens her memoir.

It is quite a structurally peculiar way to start.  Although Ackland does mention alcoholism at many points throughout For Sylvia (which, by the way, is short – 135 pages, including a 24-page introduction by Bea Howe) the rest of the memoir is structured chronologically, and focuses upon her various relationships, especially those with the anonymous R and X. 

I shan’t summarise Ackland’s accounts of her various love affairs – they take up most of the book.  I will simply write that (a) it is astonishing the number of women who throw themselves upon Valentine without the slightest provocation, and without knowing that she was a lesbian – Valentine herself didn’t know for the first few, and (b) that it can’t have made for very charming reading for Sylvia.  Although Ackland writes very well about her life, and has a simple, calm, flowing style which I had not expected of her, she isn’t being very kind to her intended audience.  I get the feeling that, just as I forgot that Sylvia had been apostrophised at the beginning, so Ackland forgot, and became too involved with the tangled webs of her love affairs.  And they are often very tangled.  Ackland got married to a poor, bewildered man after a lengthy engagement – saying, shortly beforehand, that she will either marry him tomorrow or not at all.  She refuses to consummate the marriage, but immediately commits adultery with her long-term female lover.  Indeed, there is barely a time when Ackland isn’t being, or considering being, unfaithful.  ‘I wonder,’ she writes at one point, ‘if anyone in the world was ever so idiotically vile as I was, for the best part of my youth.’  Ah!  A moment of self-awareness! (one thinks).  But one would be wrong.  Despite devoting paragraphs at various junctures to praise of Warner’s character and their love for one another, the reader then comes upon this:

I write this on a day when I have heard that I at any time now another one I love will come to live with me here, in this house where Sylvia and I have lived for twelve years together, through bitterness of private woe, through war, through my degradation and shame and throuhg the almost two years accomplished of my heavenly rescue and our increasing happiness and peace.  I do not know how this new thing has come about, nor whether it is the work of heaven of hell.  I cannot, for more than a moment at a time, realize what it will be like to be here without Sylvia – or anywhere without Sylvia.  But I have a conviction that this must be tried; although it is so dangerous that I can scarcely dare measure it even in my fancy.

I couldn’t remember, whilst reading For Sylvia, whether it has been written before or after this crisis in their relationship (for it was not permanent; Ackland chose Warner, and Warner came back to her own home, her own possessions) and was quite shocked that Ackland could write the above excerpt in the midst of eulogising their love.  I daresay I shouldn’t judge her, but it is difficult to read her wanton cruelty, having read Warner’s diaries.  In a book which centres on a person’s actions and motivations, it is impossible not to assess and respond to them.

Whilst I was reading For Sylvia, the genuine quality of Ackland’s writing, and (for some reason) its merit as good prose, made me feel a little more sympathetic to her.  I remain, of course, sympathetic to her plight with alcohol.  But in remembering her unkindness, her cruelty to Sylvia, and her absurd belief that it ‘must be’ done, I lose patience altogether.  It should be possible to separate writer and person, and I do admire Ackland more as a writer than I thought I would, but For Sylvia is an exercise in self-delusion – interesting, involving, but also infuriating.

Books I Borrowed…

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There are a few books I’ve borrowed from friends and libraries which have now been returned, and so I’m going to give each one a paragraph or two, instead of a proper review.  Partly so I can include them on my Century of Books list, but partly because it’s fun to do things differently sometimes.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that I’ll get carried away, and write far too much… well, here are the four books, in date order.  Apologies for the accidental misquotation in the sketch today… I only noticed afterwards!

Canon in Residence – V.L. Whitechurch (1904)
This was surprisingly brilliant. Rev. John Smith on a continental holiday encounters a stranger who tells him that he’d see more of human life if he adopted layman’s clothes.  Smith thinks the advice somewhat silly, but has no choice – as, during the night, the stranger swaps their outfits.  Smith goes through the rest of his holiday in somewhat garish clothing, meeting one of those ebullient, witty girls with which Edwardian novels abound.  A letter arrives telling him that he has been made canon of a cathedral town – where this girl also lives (of course!)  He makes good his escape, and hopes she won’t recognise him…

Once in his position as canon, Smith’s new outlook on life leads to a somewhat socialist theology – improving housing for the poor, and other similar principles which are definitely Biblical, but not approved of by the gossiping, snobbish inhabitants of the Cathedral Close.  As a Christian and the son of a vicar, I found this novel fascinating (you can tell that Whitechurch was himself a vicar) but I don’t think one would need to have faith to love this.  It’s very funny as well as sensitive and thoughtful; John Smith is a very endearing hero.  It all felt very relevant for 2012.  And there’s even a bit of a criminal court case towards the end.

Three Marriages – E.M. Delafield (1939)
Delafield collects together three novellas, each telling the tale of a courtship and marriage, showing how things change across years: they are set in 1857, 1897, and 1937.  Each deals with people who fall in love too late, once they (or their loved one) has already got married to somebody else.  The surrounding issues are all pertinent to their respective periods.  In 1897, and ‘Girl-of-the-Period’, Violet Cumberledge believes herself to be a New Woman who is entirely above anything so sentimental as emotional attachments – and, of course, realises too late that she is wrnog.  In 1937 (‘We Meant To Be Happy’) Cathleen Christmas marries the first man who asks, because she fears becoming one of so many ‘surplus women’ – only later she falls in love with the doctor.  But the most interesting story is the first – ‘The Marriage of Rose Barlow’.  It’s rather brilliant, and completely unexpected from the pen of Delafield.  Rose Barlow is very young when she is betrothed to her much older cousin – the opening line of the novel is, to paraphrase without a copy to hand, ‘The night before her wedding, Rose Barlow put her dolls to bed as she always had done.’  Once married, they go off to India together.   If you know a lot more about the history of India than I do, then the date 1857 might have alerted you to the main event of the novella – the Sepoy Rebellion.  A fairly calm tale of unequal marriage becomes a very dramatic, even gory, narrative about trying to escape a massacre.  A million miles from what I’d expect from Delafield – but incredibly well written and compelling.

Miss Plum and Miss Penny – Dorothy Evelyn Smith (1959)
Miss Penny, a genteel spinster living with her cook/companion Ada, encounters Miss Plum in the act of (supposedly) attempting suicide in a duckpond.  Miss Penny ‘rescues’ Miss Plum and invites her into her home. (Pronouns are tricky; I assume you can work out what I mean.)  It looks rather as though Miss Plum might have her own devious motives for these actions… but I found the characters very inconsistent, and the plot rather scattergun.  There are three men circling these women, whose intentions and affections vary a fair bit; there are some terribly cringe-worthy, unrealistic scenes of a vicar trying to get closer to his teenage son. It was a fun read, and not badly written, but Dorothy Evelyn Smith doesn’t seem to have put much effort into organising narrative arcs or creating any sort of continuity.  But diverting enough, and certainly worth an uncritical read.

The Shooting Party – Isabel Colegate (1980)
Oh dear.  Like a lot of people, I suspect, I rushed out to borrow a copy of The Shooting Party after reading Rachel’s incredibly enthusiastic review.  Go and check it out for details of the premise and plot.  I shall just say that, sadly, I found it rather ho-hum… perhaps even a little boring.  The characters all seemed too similar to me, and I didn’t much care what happened.  Even though it’s a short novel, it dragged for me, and the climax was, erm, anti-climactic.  Perhaps my expectations were too high, or perhaps my tolerance for historical novels (albeit looking back only sixty or seventy years) is too low.  Sorry, Rachel!

Two Sparks: The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Only Problem

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Although I’m actually writing this in advance of Muriel Spark Reading Week, I’m confidently going to predict that we’re all having a great time, and that you’re all putting up brilliant, thought-provoking pieces on this wonderful novelist… yes?  Yes.

Since it’s my day to post, I’m going to write fairly speedily about two Spark novels that I’ve read recently – and hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have finished at least one more.  (There will be no shortage of Spark reviews around the blogosphere this week, but if you fancy reading all my archive posts on Spark, including this one, click here.)  I chose The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) because my supervisor said it might be a useful comparison to Lolly Willowes, and The Only Problem (1984) because it looked really interesting, and also one that I hadn’t seen mentioned anywhere else in the blogosphere.  Cutting a long story short, I thought they were both brilliant – neither take the crown away from Loitering With Intent as my favourite Spark novel yet, but both add to my cumulative for Spark.  You’ll be avidly reading Spark posts here, there, and everywhere, so I’ll try to keep my reviews brief… and hopefully enough to intrigue you to read them!

The Ballad of Peckham Rye is centred, indeed, in Peckham Rye – and concerns the arrival and influence of one Dougal Douglas (sometimes going by the name of Douglas Dougal.)  The novel opens with the aftermath of a bride being jilted at the altar – indeed, with the bride’s mother insulting the jilting groom.  It’s all a little confusing (deliberately, one imagines) and it’s difficult to get the story straight – especially since everyone is superimposing their views and imaginings over the facts.  The brief chapter concludes:

But, in any case, within a few weeks, everyone forgot the details.  The affair is a legend referred to from time to time in the pubs when conversation takes a matrimonial turn.  Some say the bridegroom came back repentant and married the girl in the end.  Some say, no, he married another girl, while the bride married the best man.  It is wondered if the bride had been carrying on with the best man for some time past.  It is sometimes told that the bride died of grief and the groom shot himself on the Rye.  It is generally agreed that he answered ‘No’ at his wedding, that he went away alone on his wedding day and turned up again later.
This is a great example of how Spark plays irreverently with the normalities of narrative.  And if the reader expects everything to be neatly unfolded by the end of the novel, then he/she clearly hasn’t read much Spark before.  She obeys few authorial ‘rules’, and weaves her narratives with little concern for the reader’s expectation.  If she were writing a play (and she has; I should read them) she would unveil Chekhov’s gun in the first act, and nobody would ever lay a finger on it again.

But as someone notes on the first page of The Ballad of Peckham Rye, “It wouldn’t have happened if Dougal Douglas hadn’t come here.”  She is quite right… although it is difficult to trace exactly how Dougal Douglas influences the community, his influence is undeniable.

He turns up somewhat out of the blue, and starts working at ‘Meadows, Meade & Grindley, manufacturers of nylon textiles, a small but growing concern.’  His role is fairly vague.  Mr. Druce, the head of the company, is keen to hire ‘an Arts man’, and Mr. Druce places Douglas Douglas in charge of ‘human research.’

“I shall have to do research,” Dougal mused, “into their inner lives.  Research into the real Peckham.  It will be necessary to discover the spiritual well-spring, the glorious history of the place, before I am able to offer some impetus.”

This research, it appears, chiefly constitutes attracting the workforce from their duties, calmly meddling in their lives, and undermining their confidences.  Dougal is all things to all people, and yet (although it is never asserted directly) it appears he might be an incarnation of the Devil.  He certainly has growths in his temple which rather resemble sawn-off horns – and the events which ensue from his presence have rather the hallmark of evil.

It is a fascinating concept, and one which has Spark written all over it.  She never gives us the certainty (as Sylvia Townsend Warner does in Lolly Willowes) that we are dealing with the Devil.  There isn’t really certainty about much, for either the reader of the residents of Peckham Rye – but events spiral and, although the jilted bride is not the worst of the calamaties, it is a structural close to Dougal’s presence and the circular narrative itself.  All is done with Spark’s brilliant detached authorial voice, with doses of the surreal and strange interwoven with the commonplace and starkly observational.  Brilliant.

* * * * *

The Ballad of Peckham Rye was Spark’s fourth novel; The Only Problem comes somewhere towards the end of her almost half-century of novelising – but they are unmistakably by the same author.  The concept is quite different, but the manner of approaching it is still very Sparkian.  I say that the concept is different, but thinking about it, these two novels both concern the nature of evil, in some way – though both rather skirt round the issue.

‘The Only Problem’ of the title is, according to Harvey Gotham, the problem of suffering.  Accordingly, he has taken himself off to the French countryside to write a monograph on the Book of Job, and his mind rarely wanders from this topic.  His own suffering seems to take the form of interfering relatives and his ex-wife Effie, whom he abandoned in Italy over a stolen chocolate bar.  The sort of premise which makes me know I’m in the delightfully odd world of Muriel Spark.

Amongst the cast are Effie’s sister Ruth, and Ruth’s husband (Harvey’s old student friend) Edward.

Edward used to confide in Harvey, and he in Edward, during their student life together.  Harvey had never, to Edward’s knowledge, broken any of these confidences in the sense of revealing them to other people; but he had a way of playing them back to Edward at inopportune moments; it was disconcerting, it made Edward uncomfortable, especially as Harvey chose to remind him of things he had said which he would rather have forgotten.

That is a very Sparkian relationship.  I can’t think of any uncomplicated friendships in the eight Spark novels I’ve read – there is always some element of uneasiness or sharpness, or simply the failure to communicate naturally which characterises so many exchanges throughout her work.  I love conversations and plot expositions which subvert the normal rules in some way, or ignore the anticipated responses – it’s on the reasons I love Ivy Compton-Burnett – and here is an example from The Only Problem.  There are some spoilers in it, so skim past if you want to avoid them:

Anne-Marie had put some soup on the table.  Harvey and Ruth were silent before her, now that she wasn’t a maid but a police auxiliary.  When she had left, Ruth said, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep this down.  I’m pregnant.”
“How did that happen?” Harvey said.
“The same as it always happens.”
“How long have you known?”
“Three weeks.”
“Nobody tells me anything,” Harvey said.
“You don’t want to know anything.”

We aren’t long in the cerebal world of theological exegesis.  Effie – it is claimed – has become involved in a terrorist organisation, and the police think that Harvey is also somehow implicated.  In vain does he protest (although never especially animatedly – Spark’s characters tend towards the calm and detached) that he hasn’t spoken to Effie for years.  The rest of The Only Problem follows this mad chain of events – Harvey calmly continuing to offer his readings of Job, while the police interrogate him and his wife’s motives and actions remain mysterious.

Spark doesn’t, however, permit the obvious parallels.  A lesser novelist (had they been able to think of the juxtaposition) would have used the wider action of the novel as an example of the problem of suffering.  Instead, like in all the novels I’ve read by her, Spark just lets things happen.  There isn’t really any rhyme or reason, or grand overarching narrative point; there are no neat conclusions, just the brilliance of Spark’s eccentric but observant writing.

So, two more gems to the Spark canon!  I’m so pleased Muriel Spark Reading Week gave me the encouragement to read more Spark.  Do continue to put links in the comments box, if you’ve reviewed a Spark novel or written anything about our Muriel – and I hope you’re having a fun week!

Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy

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I wasn’t intending to join in Australian Literature Month, because I didn’t have any unread Australian novels, nor did any of the suggested titles fill me with longing.  I’m trying to be sensible with money this academic year, since I’m no longer funded, and (believe it or not) I’m even being more circumspect when it comes to book purchases!  (Keep that in your mind when you read the following…)

I bought Maestro (1989) by Peter Goldsworthy because I liked the colour of the spine.  Ok, that’s not quite true – it was the minty-turquoisey colour which made me take it off the shelf; when I discovered that it was Australian, and sounded interesting, I decided it was worth £2 of my money.  I’m glad I did – not just because I get to join in with Kim et al, but because it was rather good.

Although it’s Australian – written by an Australian, set in 1967 Darwin, Australia (the location of choice for characters leaving Neighbours, incidentally, if they’re not going to London) – much of the impetus is tied to Europe.  Eduard Keller is a Viennese refugee who teaches piano to fifteen year old Paul Crabbe (already an experienced pianist) whose family have recently moved from South Australia to the dry heat of Darwin.  Except Keller doesn’t teach piano in any traditional sense – he forbids Paul to use the piano for the first few weeks, instead instructing him in the importance of each individual finger…

Keller waggled a forefinger in front of my nose.  It was our second lesson?  Our third?

“This finger is selfish.  Greedy.  A… a delinquent.  He will steal from his four friends, cheat, lie.”

He sheathed the forefinger in his closed fist as if it were the fleshy blade of a Swiss army knife and released the middle finger.

“Mr. goody-goody,” he said, banging the finger down on middle C repeatedly.  “Teacher’s pet.  Does what he is told.  Our best student.”

Last came the ring finger.

“Likes to follow his best friend,” he told me.  “Likes to… lean on him sometimes.”

He lifted his elbows upwards and outwards.

“Those are the pupils.  This is the teacher.  The elbow…”
I have an ambivalent relationship with novels about music.  I enjoyed The Well-Tempered Clavier by William Coles (although I was glad that Maestro didn’t follow it down the Notes on a Scandal-esque path, not least because of the sixty year gap between Keller and Paul, but also because it’s not a very original course to take.)  I loved The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart, which is non-fiction.  But novels leave me cold when they rely upon the ethos that music is the highest of all forms.  I played the piano from the age of seven onwards, and although I later became friends with my piano teacher (the lady who first told me of Miss Hargreaves) and eventually grew to like playing the piano, for many years I passionately hated it.  The best feeling in the world (and my brother agrees with me) was when you rang the doorbell for a piano lesson… and the teacher didn’t answer!  The worst feeling was when you thought the piano teacher wasn’t going to answer, and then, after a long gap… she did.  So, anyway, this has given me an odd relationship with stories about learning instruments, and my dislike of elitism comes into play with musical maestros.

I’m sure it’s possible to be a musical expert without being arrogant and rude, of course, but Keller is not one of these.  He is one of the most rude, supercilious characters I’ve ever encountered – but he is battling his own demons, and the love and respect Paul feels towards Keller are contagious.  Even so, I found it arrogant rather than inspiring when he said things like this:

“Perhaps you could play one of the exam pieces, Paul,” my father suggested.  “A private concert for the three of us.”

“The Brahms?”

“The Beethoven,” Keller injected, “might be preferable.”

I played Beethoven that night as well as I had ever played, and turned afterwards, smiling, ready for praise.

“Beautiful,” my mother breathed.  “Don’t you agree, Herr Keller?”

“An excellent forgery,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Technically perfect,” he said.

He drained his wineglass before continuing.  It was to be his longest monologue of the evening:

“At such moments I always remember a forged painting I once saw.  Each violent brushstroke was reproduced was painstaking, non-violent care.  The forgery must have taken many many times longer than the original to complete.  It was technically better than the original.”

He rose from his chair and walked a little unsteadily towards the door: “And yet something was missing.  Not much – but something.“

At the door he paused, and turned: “And that small something may as well have been everything.”

I find music snobbery intensely irritating – no, that’s not quite true, I feel desperately sorry for people who are only content with perfection, in any field.  Doubtless it is a form of discernment, but if your discernment reaches the level that you castigate and despise almost everything you encounter, you’re setting yourself up for a miserable time.

But Keller is miserable for other reasons… it gradually becomes clear that he was more involved in the Second World War than he originally admits.  I shan’t give the game away, although it isn’t a big twist and doesn’t come as much of a surprise to the reader.  If you’re rolling your eyes at yet another long-shadow-of-war novel, then don’t.  It’s only one element in the interesting construction of the interaction between Keller and Paul – which is the really interesting central focus of Maestro.  Their relationship isn’t romantic or fatherly or even particularly close.  Keller resists any sort of emotional connection, and Paul is far too full of youthful insensitivity to do anything but blunder into conversations in which he is too immature to participate, even if Keller were willing.  But what Goldsworthy builds between Keller and the Crabbes is still somehow beautiful.  The connection between people who never open up to one another; the legacies left behind a relationship which could not even be called a friendship.  Goldsworthy has done this beautifully.

One of the things I’m realising, doing A Century of Books and stepping further outside the interwar period, where I am happiest, is the way a decade colours each novel, even without the author intentionally following the zeitgeist.  A bit like people who claim not to follow fashion, until they look back at old photographs and see how much they were unwittingly influenced by the style of the day.  So Maestro is filtered through the lens of the 1980s, whether Goldsworthy likes it or not.  I certainly wouldn’t read that people ‘made slow, muffled, reckless love’ in the pages of an Elizabeth von Arnim novel, for instance.  Indeed, the whole coming-of-age storyline (although much less irritating in Maestro than it is in some book) is very 1980s, and rather incidental to the main thrust of the novel – but perhaps it’s main purpose is to demonstrate that Keller does not completely occupy Paul’s thoughts.  He is not obsessed by Keller, but their relationship will alter a great deal in his life.

Maestro is a difficult little book to write about – it is wise, original, and rather beautiful.  I would love it a great deal more if someone could translate it into the sensitivities of the 1940s, say, but of course that cannot be done.  It reminded me a bit of Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker and Virginia by Jens Christian Grondahl, but I’m hard-pressed to say quite why – the influence of genius, for the former?  The lifelong effects of a brief connection, for the latter?  Perhaps, truth be told, Maestro isn’t quite like anything else I’ve read before, but does bring together themes and traits I’ve seen in many other authors, writing both before and after Goldsworthy.

As for whether it’s a representative Australian novel – well, of course there’s no such thing.  Goldsworthy conveyed the heat of Darwin very well, but aside from that… I’ll have to see which other novels are picked up across the blogs during what’s left of Australian Literature Month.  Thanks, Kim, for indirectly encouraging to find, buy, and enjoy a novel I would otherwise have left in the shop.  And thanks for helping fill 1989 in A Century of Books!

So Long, See You Tomorrow – William Maxwell

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I want to cry a little bit, because I just spent two hours writing a post on So Long, See You Tomorrow, which disappeared when I tried to add a picture.  Sometimes I hate Blogger… Well, I’m going to give it another go, but if my enthusiasm wanes a little, you’ll know why…

It has ended up being quite neat, though, that I’m blogging about a novella by William Maxwell – following on from other reviews in this vein this week.  I fell in love with Maxwell when I read They Came Like Swallows (thanks Karen!), bought up a few of his books, read half of The Chateau, and… stopped.  Not sure why.  But Rachel’s review of So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) catapaulted it up my tbr pile, and while I didn’t love it quite as much as They Came Like Swallows, it’s not far off.

I love books which centralise the memory of long-distant, momentous events – especially if uncertainty, anxiety or guilt bring these recollections to the fore.  That makes me sound a bit sadistic, doesn’t it?  But examples like Ian McEwan’s Atonement and, even better, Jens Christian Grondahl’s Virginia (reviewed here) show how this can create a structure of dual narratives, looking forwards and backwards, memories and regrets influencing the telling of past and present.  Guilt is perhaps the most powerful of emotions, especially when nothing can be done to appease or rectify.

The novella opens with a murder, told in Maxwell’s deceptively simple manner:

One winter morning shortly before daybreak, three men loading gravel there heard what sounded like a pistol shot.  Or, they agreed, it could have been a car backfiring.  Within a few seconds it had grown light.  No one came to the pit through the field that lay alongside it, and they didn’t see anyone walking on the road.  The sound was not a car backfiring; a tenant farmer named Lloyd Wilson had just been shot and killed, and what they heard was the gun that killed him.

Lloyd Wilson and the murderer, Clarence Smith, had once been best friends.  Living on neighbouring farms, their families had grown alongside each other, and Maxwell builds up this dynamic between neighbours and friends in a believable, simple manner – until circumstances change and the friendship is gradually unwoven, with the tragic results already revealed to the reader at the outset.  The narrator’s guilty remembrances stem from failing to support his best friend, Cletus Smith, while his life fell apart.  This guilt colours the narrator’s presentation of the past, and is a net from which he has not been able to escape.  The novel moves between past and present, developing each narrative line, and demonstrating the far-flung influence of long ago events – in a way which flows beautifully, never forced, quietly showing Maxwell’s novelistic expertise.

The narrator’s own life was not easy.  Crippling shy and suffering from the early loss of his mother, the narrator feels that he has disappointed his father, and is out of kilter with the sort of boy he is expected to be.  Maxwell touches gently on the father’s grief, in an example of his understated but powerful style:

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.  He continued to sleep in the bed he and my mother had shared, and tried to act in a way she would have wanted him to, and I suspect that as time passed he was less and less sure what that was.

Many lesser novelists would have spent several pages dissecting the narrator’s father’s emotions, but Maxwell’s talent is that he does not need to do so – he encapsulates everything we need to read in two short sentences.  It is this approach which exemplifies Maxwell’s brilliance, but also how easily he could be underestimated.

The father does remarry, and the family is moved to a new home.  I love portrayals of houses in literature, and the scenes of their new home being built make for some great sections – the narrator compares the building site to Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture ‘The Palace at 4am’.  There is no picture of the sculpture in the book, it is only described verbally, but I went and tracked down an image.  In its curious form, seemingly incomplete and distorted, it reflects not only a building site but the structures of memory:

 

For, despite the murder and the family tensions, the true subject of So Long, See You Tomorrow is memory and the fallibility of memory.  Not so much that facts may be altered, but the distortion of remembered emotions and responses; superimposing later feelings over old ones, and the overlap between past and present:

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.  Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end.  In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
A murder mystery usually has a fairly straightforward structure – clues must be laid, of course, and herrings must be red, but the masters have laid out the pattern.  By removing the mystery of whodunnit, Maxwell explores the much more human, fascinating dynamics of how circumstances and personalities led to murder – and how the aftermath continues for decades and decades.  To construct a narrative through the abstract themes of grief, regret, love, pain, and guilt, Maxwell sets himself a much more difficult task – and achieves it.  I’m excited eventually to read more of Maxwell, and it was worth having to write this post twice to tell you how good this little book is…

Others who got Stuck into it:
 
“I don’t think I have come across a finer work of modern fiction.” – Rachel, Book Snob
 
“Maxwell’s prose is sparse and beautiful, very different from McEwan’s florid poetic and sometimes beautiful prose.” – Trevor, The Mookse and the Gripes
 
“This book will bear many readings whilst doubtless yielding new insights each time.” – Lynne, dovegreyreader