The Chase by Mollie Panter-Downes – #1925Club

One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes is one of the worst-kept secrets of the mid-20th century, isn’t it? She isn’t a household name, and you might not even find that book in the average bookshop, but it’s well-known that One Fine Day is an absolutely extraordinary novel of life immediately after World War Two. Some of her stories are in print with Persephone, and her novel My Husband Simon was one of the first titles in the British Library Women Writers series – but, for such a well-regarded author, some of her books still remain a mystery.

For years, I’ve been tracking down her books at reasonable prices. The Chase will currently set you back at least £200 online, though my patience paid off with a much cheaper copy a few years ago. I’ve now read all of her novels, and unquestionably One Fine Day is the best – but I enjoyed The Chase a lot more than I expected to when it started.

The novel opens in East London, and I’m sorry to say that the first line of dialogue is “Blimey! ‘Ere’s the Standish kid!” – though the actual first line of the novel is rather more beautiful than that: ‘The kindly winter dusk was just falling over Perk’s Alley, softening its grime and squalor, making the gaunt, sordid houses shadow blurred, like a Post-Impressionist painting.’ We are thrust into the dynamics of a group of Cockney boys having a fight, and it has absolutely no authenticity. As I wrote in my review of her novel Storm Bird, it is clear that Panter-Downes was, at this stage of her career, drawing her characters and stories from what she had read in books, rather than what she had experienced. What did she know about life in poverty, with an alcoholic father, for a young boy? Had she ever met a Cockney? I suspect not.

There are elements that are clearly borrowed from melodrama, or cinema, and our young hero – Charles Standish – is given to vocalising his thoughts in the way that a silent film hero of the period might have had appear onscreen. It means that there isn’t a huge amount of subtlety in this early section. For instance, Charles says this out loud, to nobody:

“Some folks have too much, an’ others too little. It ain’t fair. Every one ought ter ‘elp every one else wot ain’t got enough – not that we want their blarsted charity.”

I wasn’t sure how much of this I was going to be able to take, if I’m honest. What kept me going was Panter-Downes’ wit, sprinkled in alongside:

One of Charles’ mottoes was: “Always look as nice as you can – you never know who you’re going to meet on the way.”

The only person he met on the way to High Derwent was on futuristically spotted cow looking over a hedge, but I am sure she was very much impressed by the angle of Charles’ hat.

Things got a lot more enjoyable when Charles comes across Nick. Dominic – known as Nick – is eight or nine years older and considerably posher. He is an affable, witty, silly man who speaks pleasant nonsense at him and welcomes him into a set of young men and women wealthy enough to be bohemian. Nick is very like a P.G. Wodehouse character, and Panter-Downes carries him off well – a total pleasure to be around. For Charles, he is the first person to be kind to him without expecting anything back. Their acquiantance is short-lived, but it gives him confidence to be aspirational. He carries Nick’s name (and a tie) with him, idolising him as a lesser god.

We jump forward a bit and Charles has got a job as a steward on a ship going to America. There, he beguiles a financial tycoon who gives him a job in his office. You see what I mean about Panter-Downes borrowing from Hollywood? Given the realism of One Fine Day, you certainly have to adjust yourself to the sort of writer she was a couple of decades earlier – and then enjoy it on its own terms. It’s why the novel is more successful after it detaches from the Cockney working-class background – because Panter-Downes’ attempts to merge realism and fantasy don’t work, until we are loosened to enjoy the fantasy. As someone says of him later in the novel (explaining the title of the novel, too):

“He is a solitary sort of chap really. I mean, he’s worked like hell for years to get where he is to-day. His chase, he called it once to me. I bet it was some chase. It was sheer luck that Porter got interested in him, of course – I dare say you know the story – but if he hadn’t followed up the advantage with sheer hard work it wouldn’t have done him a scrap of good. As it is, he sweated up from the bottom, always alone, and – well, a millionaire at thirty isn’t bad.”

Which isn’t to say there isn’t emotional reality to the novel. As it progresses, Charles gets involved (fairly unknowingly) in a love triangle. As (of course!) he becomes extremely successful himself, and moves back to England, he and his lovable secretary (Clive) get into another love quadrangle with a pair of sisters, all of which is enjoyable to read and has genuine emotional weight, despite the unlikely paths we’ve taken to get there.

I’m racing through the novel as I describe it, and that is fitting: it is the sort of novel you race through. When we move onto a new stage in Charles’s life, a new group of characters take centre stage and we tend to forget the ones who have come before – though Panter-Downes is also very good at re-introducing them when the moment is right. Her settings of a New York boarding house and an English estate are both perfect for bringing together various interesting characters and dynamics between them, and if she doesn’t know much about the way one might become a financial whizzkid, then, well, neither do I. After the false start of the horrible attempts at Cockney dialect, I loved reading The Chase.

It is amazing to think that she was only 18 or 19 years old when she wrote The Chase. It definitely comes across as the work of an older writer, but perhaps less than ten years older. The author’s inexperience of the world is clear – but what is also clear is, under the froth of the genre she has stumbled into, the seed of her psychological wisdom and her moments of subtlety. It’s a curious concoction. As a novel, it is a fun romp without the brilliant nuance and insight of One Fine Day – but, at the same time, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the writer of The Chase grew into the writer of One Fine Day.

I don’t know if The Chase would ever get reprinted. Since the main character is a man, it falls down on one of the main criteria for the British Library Women Writers series. Persephone have said they won’t. But I don’t think it would do her any disservice if somebody did bring it out again, and I certainly had a lot of fun reading it.