In this novel of the far future, a small rural community has made a religion out of ensuring that all human beings are recognizably human. This means some tough decisions about newborns with too many toes. That’s right, it’s the post-nuclear future!
I read this first as a teenager, and I note I feel much less worried now than I did then about the nuclear apocalypse. Largely because I am pretty sure we will get to a climate apocalypse long before a nuclear one. So that’s good.
In this book a woman finally gives up on her childhood dreams. It is inspirational. The woman was brought up strictly, in a vicarage. She has never married, and is now a governess. She leads a rather joyless, but rigidly upright, life. Then she is sent in error to a job interview for a maid, and meets a young woman who is cycling through a large number of wealthy men, looking for love and backing for her theatre career. It’s amoral but apparently a lot of fun. Here is a sample of one of the women she meets, a beautician, telling about her late husband:
“If you act “ marriage or nothing” they generally give you marriage. I was very lucky. I went to his head, but he couldn’t stand the pace. He got a nice tombstone and I got the parlour.”
The governess gives up her old ideas, throws herself in a life of nightclubs and hair dye, and is much happier. It’s a silly, sort of dated book, but I enjoyed it as a story about how it’s never too late to find your own personal freedom.
I am passionately fond of Graham Greene. I have in fact been rationing his books to myself, so I don’t run through them too quick in my lifetime. I picked this one up at random, and was excited, but had to stop reading it part way through. This was not because it was so bad – many parts of it were very good, because Greene can’t help to be good – but because it was not as good as he can be, and I did not want my admiration for him spoiled. The story got a bit silly – I think he was trying for a spy novel? But I’ll never know because I stopped before I could find out.
Greene lived for a long time in Clapham in London, where I also live. He also lived a good amount of time in Freetown in Sierra Leone, as I did. The overlap of people who know both must be pretty small. I enjoyed his HEART OF THE MATTER, a great novel of Freetown, and this one was very much a Clapham book. I enjoyed the insight into the war in particular:
London was no longer one great city: it was a collection of small towns . . . Knightsbridge and Sloane St were not at war, but Chelsea was, and Battersea was in the front line . . In Clapham where day raids were frequent there was a hunted look which was absent from Westminster, where the night raids were heavier but the shelters were better
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.
A mysterious little gothic novel about an abusive father and levitation. The arc of the story did not really work for me, so I won’t go into it, but the joy is in the world. Let me quote extensively from the first page, where the main character, a young woman, meets a strange old man on the street:
. . . I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would have most likely worn kneecaps. We came to a great red railway arch that crossed the road like a heavy rainbow; and near this arch there was a vet’s house with a lamp outside. I said, “You must excuse me,” and left this poor man among the privet hedges. I entered the house. . . . In the brown hall my mother was standing; and she looked at me with her sad eyes half -covered by their heavy lids, but did not speak. She just stood there. Her bones were small and her shoulders sloped; her teeth were not straight either; so, if she had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her.
What a wonderful writer she is! I am totally inspired by her biography too. Unlike many other writers, this is not because of the number of books she wrote, or the contributions to literary salons, or the generally impressive CV, and etc, but because she was poor (in the introduction she tells us what the flat she is living in costs to rent, I LOVE this) and married the wrong people and had tons of jobs and lived in multiple countries and wanted to be a painter not a writer. I just find it inspirationally and wonderfully messy.
This is my fourth novel of Pym’s, and some say it is her best. It was I am afraid too subtle for me. It tells the story of a fairly contented married woman, who half-considers an affair. It turns out that the guy she considers is actually gay. Or at least that is what I think might be being implied.
It was kind of a funny book. Here is the woman, sitting in a beautiful house in a bombed out area:
It made me sad to think of the decay and shabbiness all around, and the streamlined blocks of new flats springing up on the bombed sites, although I supposed it was a good thing that children should now be running about and playing in the square gardens, their shouts and laughter drowned by the noise of the machinery that was building hideous new homes for them
And yet it was also kind of sad. Here she is wondering about her proposed lover’s ‘roommate’ who she had been told is his ‘colleague.’ She starts to wonder in what sense he is a colleague.
I remembered with a pang Piers saying that we were all, in a sense, colleagues in the grim business of getting through life
I have enjoyed all Pym’s other books, and think she is a wonderful writer, so this book worries me. I feel like there is something profound in it, but I seem to have missed it.
