The Oracles by Margaret Kennedy

It’s not often that I buy a book and read it straightaway, but I was so intrigued by The Oracles (1955) by Margaret Kennedy when I picked it up in Chipping Camden last weekend that I immediately started it.

Everybody has been reading The Feast in the past couple of years, and I enjoyed it a lot – but had to add it to the list of Kennedy novels that haven’t quite bowled me over. I’ve read four or five of her novels – I’ve liked some, admired some, disliked some, even given up on one. But I’ve finally loved one: The Oracles is my favourite of hers by some distance.

Also published as Act of God in the US, the cover of my edition tells you how the novel starts. We are instantly flung into a vicious thunderstorm:

The thunderstorm frightened a great many people in East Head. It came after a phenomenal heatwave, and it reached the Bristol Channel upon a Saturday night.

During the afternoon it had rumbled a long way off, to the north-east, over the Welsh coast. At ten o’clock the thunder-claps were coming fast upon the heels of the flashes. An hour later it was described by everybody as right overhead, although this hardly did justice to its menace. Had it remained vertical it would at least have kept to its own place; it became horizontal, a continuous glare, punctuated by short sharp cracks. It no longer descended from the sky, but sprang out of the earth – sizzling along the roads and blazing through drawn window curtains.

Little does East Head know the far-reaching effects this storm will have… more on that in a moment. East Head is a small village that is ordinary in almost every respect. The one thing that sets it apart is the presence of Conrad Swann, the noted sculptor. His name looms large in avant-garde circles and he is widely revered by a sizeable group of acolytes, all of whom long to be close to him but who receive minimal encouragement in return.

Swann is better as a sculptor than a husband or father. He is living in East Head with a woman who is not his wife (who is, in fact, the wife of his best friend) – though this scandal is no longer new, and the villagers don’t much care anymore. This is 1955, after all, not 1925. He has a sizeable brood of children and his mistress has brought a couple with her too – all the children are left alone to live more or less wild, looking after one another and playing out elaborate fantasies in their back garden. There is little money to spare, and neither the villagers nor the acolytes want anything much to do with them – but they are self-sufficient. Which is just as well, because Swann has absconded.

Conrad Swann has been working on a new sculpture – all anybody knows is that it is called Apollo. There is a group of local intellectuals who want to put their village (and themselves) on the map, and they want to secure the sculpture with local public funds. Other intellectuals think it should be taken to a more prestigious place. And most of the villagers are contentedly mystified by it, and anticipate being mystified by anything Swann produces.

What only the reader – and one of the young Swann siblings – realises is that ‘Apollo’, discovered in the shed, is not the sculpture Swann was working on. What is taken for ‘Apollo’ is actually… a garden chair that was struck by lightning in the storm. It has been melted and bent out of shape. And – deliciously – the intellectuals think it’s a wonderful piece.

“Mr. Pattison!” said Martha solemnly. “Here is a work of complete integrity. It makes no compromise, no concession, to what the public may demand, or think that it likes. To state his secret, private vision is all that concerns Conrad. Can’t you understand?”

“That,” put in Carter, “is something which you can’t expect anybody to understand but us, Martha. The artists are the only honest people.”

Margaret Kennedy has great fun throughout the novel in poking fun at this sort of person – but The Oracles is much more than a satire of artistic elitism. I’ve not mentioned them yet, but the real central characters are Dickie and Christina. They have only been married for a couple of years, but is evident that both of them think it was probably a mistake. He is a solicitor regarded as ‘bumpkin’ by the oracles and considered too clever by half by some of the villagers. He has an honest, unpretentious interest in Swann’s work and is keen to learn more – and, brilliantly, he doesn’t fall for the hype: he even reads several books on Apollo to try and see a connection between the chair/sculpture and the god, without success.

This pursuit of art makes Christina feel alienated and judged, though. He makes the mistake of suggesting she could be ‘provincial’, and this unintentional barb echoes throughout the rest of the novel – Kennedy expertly shows us how someone can return time and again to a word that cuts them to the quick, and Christina retaliates with increasing unkindness. Ironically, Dickie is quite provincial himself much of the time, and doesn’t seem to mind. It is a marriage of unequals in many ways, and it comes to a head over a seemingly unrelated question of art.

Kennedy’s talent is to make both Christina and Dickie quite sympathetic – certainly moreso than any of the other adults in the novel. Dickie is driven by a genuine wish to learn, and Christina has an intense compassion for others, particularly children. They are seeing the worst in each other, but the reader can see the best in them. Here’s Kennedy on the aftermath of one of their feuds, caused by Dickie getting embarrassingly drunk at an event:

He could not, in any case, have told her much, because he remembered very little. He was desperately ashamed of himself. He had been drunk before, once or twice in his life, but only upon excusable occasions and never since his marriage. It shocked him deeply to think that his wife should have been obliged to put him to bed – that he had left her all alone and frightened for hours while he made a beast of himself. She had, he felt, every right to be furious and he was most anxious to apologise, if allowed an opportunity. He got none. She would not even permit him to say that his conduct had been bestial. Not at all. If he must know what she thought when she found him lying on the mat, he had better understand that a man in such a condition is generally rather pathetic. No, she was not angry. She was sorry for him. He need say no more about it.

Free and full forgiveness is the good woman’s most formidable weapon. Nothing makes a man feel smaller; yet few husbands have the brutality, or the strength of mind, to reject it. Christina was aware of its essential unfairness, but she was really very angry.

The Oracles is a very funny book but it’s a book with a lot of heart to it. Towards the end, as we see more of Swann himself, it feels little less heart-filled – but I still really fell for it. The ingredients I’d enjoyed in different Kennedy novels come together here in the perfect recipe – for me, at least. I’m aware that I probably think it’s Kennedy’s best work (that I’ve read) because it is the one that is closest to my taste. If it sounds like it could be closest to yours too, then I recommend seeking it out.