Karen and I are unusually in sync with our club reads this time. Not only did we both visit Beverley Nichols’ All I Could Never Be earlier in the week, we are both finishing with Emma Smith’s The Far Cry. (Here are Karen’s thoughts.) Apparently I bought my copy in February 2012, so it is good to finally get it off the shelf – and it was nothing like I expected.
This isn’t my first dance with Emma Smith. Years ago, I loved her childhood memoir and another memoir about working on the Grand Union Canal. They were written with a curious sort of confident naivety, and I didn’t know how that would translate to fiction – and, indeed, Smith only published two novels: The Far Cry in 1949, and a second in 1978.
The heroine of the novel is Teresa Digby, who is 14 years old but often feels rather younger or rather older. She is a bit spoiled and petulant, but also worldly-wise and manipulative – and yet still an enjoyable, spirited person to be around. Perhaps we like her because she is so clearly better than her relatives: her unaffectionate, domineering Aunt May and her impetuous and selfish father. Her mother has long been absent.
Smith is very amusing about this unconventional, discordant domestic set up. For example…
Aunt May was already at breakafast. She said nothing to Teresa and Teresa said nothing to her, having chosen to play the part of sulky disgrace rather than any of the other parts she might have chosen from a repertoire acquired during nearly fourteen years of being late for breakfast while staying with Aunt May. Her aunt, for her part, preferred this attitude to pertness or pretended dreaminess, though she disliked all of Teresa’s attitudes, and Teresa too, together with most other little girls. So, thinking intensely about their idea of one another, they ate and drank their way through breakfast.
The opening section of The Far Cry reminded me of Rachel Ferguson’s writing: an eccentric family, a drily sardonic narrator, and characters you can’t help enjoying despite their less appealing qualities.
This set-up is suddenly disrupted when Teresa’s absent mother decides that she is coming back to reclaim her. Mr Digby can’t stand the idea, and so he spontaneously decides that he and Teresa will move to India! There is a little method to his madness: this is where his other daughter (and Teresa’s half-sister) Ruth lives with her husband. And so off they go…
Being the 1940s, travel of course is a much more prolonged experience than today, and a significant amount of the novel takes place onboard the ship. It is there that Mr Digby befriends a Mr Littleton, and Teresa finds solace and companionship with a sharp and undemonstrative older lady, Miss Spooner. It is a meeting of minds, or at least of temperaments. I thought this was rather a lovely description:
Two nights before they arrived, Teresa, undressing, said: “It’s so awfull hot. I wish I could sleep outside.” “Why not? said Miss Spooner, “I think it’s a very good idea. I’ll sleep outside as well.”
It was easily done. They pushed their mattresses and sheets through the cabin window and, with some slight feeling of indecorum, tripped down the passage in their nightclothes. Most people had already gone to bed. Except for a few late walkers, the decks were empty. Teresa leaned over the deserted rail, her night-gown blowing round her bare ankles, and watched the huge and deeply orange moon lumber over the rim of the sea, begin to climb, begin almost at once to fade and turn pale as though defeated by too many stars. Then she lay beneath her sheet, drew it up to her chin and tried not to go to sleep. But the sound of a couple a few feet away quietly talking together made her droswy; the ceaseless splash of waves, the round and solitary ring of last footsteps passing close beside her, all these increased her drowsiness and so she slept.
Her writing is often so beautiful, and well-judged between the ornate and the direct. She demonstrates such assurance for a debut novelist. Smith is also excellent at shifting moods and evolving perspectives. Because, at first, Teresa finds India overwhelming and unfriendly. It is a world she never imagined, and she has been flung into it without any real preparation – all to live with a sister whom she barely knows. But there is a moment when she suddenly – with the adaptability of youth – makes her peace with her new world. More than that, relishes it.
With wide eyes and open mouth Teresa drank in the confusion as though she tasted a new wine and could never have enough of it. Her fears were gone, her caution; her former instinct, as old as herself, to repulse externals, gave way to a reckless rush of confidence. She flung down her defences; she threw open her doors. She longed to be occupied by this anonymous turmoil which she felt to be so safe, for in all these crowds not a single face looked at her threatenning, not a hand touched her except by accident, not a soul knew who she was or cared.
There are so many lovely passages in this book, and I shan’t type any more out, but what impresses me is that The Far Cry feels like a character piece. Sometimes, novelists who focus so much on dreamy prose are equally dreamy when it comes to precision in their characters. Smith manages to do both. Teresa is a fascinating, evolving creation.
Along the way, though, the perspective changes. We start to see things from Ruth’s point of view. And it quickly becomes clear that her marriage with Edwin is a lot more troubled and complex than Ruth’s sister or father realise. She is rather horrified by them descending on her, and very torn over the future of her relationship. The jubilant, funny tone of the earlier chapters has gradually changed over the course of The Far Cry, and by now it has become quite a reflective, sombre novel. The transition happens naturally enough, so I think it’s probably deliberate – but it would be hard to discuss the tone of the novel with any consistency.
I shan’t give away any more plot, but the novel definitely kept me interested through to the end – mostly by the delineations of the characters, and the beautiful depictions of their various responses to their environments. It’s worth acknowledging that, like any British writer in the 1940s, it isn’t as sensitive to the Indian characters as it should be. And it is curious that no mention is made of Indian independence, which happened in 1947. I suppose the novel must be set shortly before that, and the political rumblings would have been ignored or entirely foreign to Teresa, Ruth and Mr Digby.
My only other reservation is that the end has rather a rush of dramatic incidents. It is only here that Smith betrays the hand of a debut novelist, who rather overplays the big events. I think a subtler ending would have better befitted the novel’s overall nuance.
But a small quibble to end this review and end the 1949 Club. It’s lovely to pick up a Persephone that has been waiting for me for so long, and find it wonderful.
