I found this in a second hand shop for £1. It is a never-ending chore, finding something to read, so sometimes it is nice to not have a preference and rely on chance. It turned out to be a pretty interesting book about a failing marriage. This couple agreed to have an open marriage, though this was really the wife’s preference rather than the husband’s. It ws supposed to only imply anonymous one night stands. The husband however falls in love with a woman named Ada, and they start an affair. Meanwhile, Ada is busy falling in love with the wife. Drama!

I admit though I just couldn’t get into it, and the reason is not very attractive: it filled me with class rage. I was feeling okay about the story until the wife casually mentions that their children go to DULWICH COLLEGE. And this while complaining about the traffic as she DRIVES FROM DULWICH TO PECKHAM. Shut the f*ck up. If you live in London these indicators will tell you that these are revoltingly upper middle class characters, and that shouldn’t be a problem except it is. Also I thought it was strange that the author seemed to think the characters main problem was their marriage. They also don’t really have any friends and barely speak to their teenage children. Like I think their problems run deeper than their marriage, probably having their roots in all that UNEARNED INCOME.

Appallingly, I may have become too woke for Victorian literature. I hope not, because I have always liked Elizabeth Gaskell. But this book, MARY BARTON, I had to give up. The title character is a young seamstress who it is clear is about to be led astray by a wealthy man. There are lot of warnings about getting puffed up by vanity and etc. I just couldn’t slog through to where this poor girl gets her just deserts. Her aunt had followed the same path and there is a gross/laughable section in which we meet her as a despondent prostitute.

That said, Gaskell was woke by the standards of her day. In the introduction, she speaks about how she wrote this book to speak for the working classes, who she unself-consciously calls ‘this dumb people’. She is making a valiant effort to capture the lives of the poor, and It is interesting to reflect that even so recently as 1848, working class people had so little access to literacy, or leisure for writing, that indeed they had no hope of writing their own story.

I re-read this while slogging through COVID, and I am struck by what a good book it is. According to my blog, I haven’t read it since at least 2009 (when I started keeping track). I am amazed by how clearly I remember it: characters, incidents, even lines. Pandora Braithwaite is the ur-crush of Western Culture.

I was surprised to learn that Townsend was 35 when she wrote it, and it was her first published book. Her teenage son apparently once asked her why they didn’t go on safari ‘like everyone else; and the voice for the book popped into her head fully formed. She wrote the first third in a matter of weeks – and then put it away in a box. It only got finished because other people pushed for it (a similar story btw for Stephen King’s CARRIE) and it just shows you: we really have no idea about the quality of what we are doing. I find that both horrifying and liberating.

This is a harrowing story of a marriage going bad. I clearly have little to no experience of really toxic relationships, because mostly I was just like: why don’t you leave? Clearly I lack experience, because I struggle to even imagine a world where I would put with how this lady gets spoken to.

Also super harrowing is her relationship with her mother, possibly worse because here there are not so many harsh words. Let me quote at length. Here she is on her mother:

Perhaps I should be moved by her more than I am. I love animals, their natural ways. I have asked her about my – our – childhood, that house, but you wouldn’t think I’d spoken. She just stared back at me. Maybe she never noticed what we grew up with. Left to herself, back there, as I’m sure she felt she was, she laced the fetid air with her high-pitched humming her little self-announcements:

‘Well, I’m going to sit in the sun lounge if anyone wants me. Do they? No.’

‘Well, I’m going to eat some strawberries and cream and watch Wimbledon, Yes.’

My brother was even more incensed by these notices than I.

‘Do I give a shit?’ he’d scream.

You couldn’t see the television if the curtains were open, so they never were open. She’d clear aspace on the settee and hold up by her chest a bowl of mushy frozen strawberries, topped with a spray cream. She lifted her chin, bared her teeth.

Historical fiction is kind of rare, and this is a wonderful example of it. It tells about a 1913 shooting party, and is really remarkable in just 181 pages in creating a complex series of relationships and characters.

It’s difficult to summarize it, despite it being so short, because it’s a masterclass in density of feeling and incident. As in real life, not much is happening, but beneath is a heaving mass of emotions.

Most interesting I found was the way in which the book functioned as a meditation on the pre-War world. These people had so much inherited wealth they could do whatever they wanted with their time, and they chose to spend it killing things. Is interesting to think if automation/AI ever ends work for all of us, what we will do with the time.

Also, just FYI, the Criterion notes about Colegate that she “may well be the greatest living English novelist, and yet many readers have never heard of her.” Truly, ladies, the playing field is not level.