The Handyman by Penelope Mortimer (Joan Kahn/St. Martin’s Press, 1983)

I’ve read and enjoyed many books by Penelope Mortimer (The Pumpkin Eater, My Friends Say It’s Bulletproof, The Home, A Villa in Summer,  Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, Saturday Lunch at the Browning’s), and I think I liked this one least of all.  In fact, I found The Handyman to be an almost thoroughly unpleasant book.

It’s the story of an older woman learning how to live on her own without children or a  husband — a situation that is also explored, with far more subtlety and acumen, in Mortimer’s book The Home. 

Phyllis Muspratt’s husband drops dead one morning at the breakfast table, and she is forced to maintain her genteel and comfortable life with little help from her son and daughter (she appears to have no friends).  She sells the family house in Surrey and moves to a somewhat dilapidated country cottage in the drab and ornery village of Cryck, which is ruled over by a despotic landowner called The Brigadier and whose citizens are terrorized by The Brigadier’s “boys,” an unsavory pack of young men who ride around on motorcycles damaging personal property. 

Also living in Cryck is Rebecca Bourne, an Iris Murdoch-ish author, who has lost the inspiration to write and who maniacally gardens, smokes cigarettes, scowls, and is thoroughly unpleasant to everyone she comes in contact with.  Phyllis tries to befriend Rebecca with no luck at all, but does endear herself to Rebecca’s damaged daughter, who has just been released from the bin (her word) after a suicide attempt. 

Phyllis’s two children are both preoccupied with their own lives.  Her (gay) son Michael is an editor at the London publishing house  that — surprise! — once published Rebecca Broune, and her daughter, Sophie, is a wife and mother who doesn’t really seem to like her mother or care very much about her, perhaps because she has her own problems — her husband Bron is a serial philanderer.

When life in Cryck becomes unbearable — the titular handyman of the title, who is renovating Phyllis’s cottage, turns out to be a total sexual creep and tries to molest her — Phyllis decides to sell the cottage and move to a retirement home, where she can live safely and happily with other genteel, tea-drinking people and enjoy her old age in peace and quiet.  She arranges all this behind her children’s back and days before she is due to make the move, while feeling the happiest she has ever felt in her entire life, she falls down the attic stairs, hits her head on the door, and instantly dies.  (It takes four days for her body to be found.)

Putting a nice, if boring, character like Phyllis through such dreary ordeals only to have her die accidentally at the end of the book seems rather cruel and perverse to me — to both the character and the reader.  Perhaps Mortimer feels that Phyllis is too dull and conventional a character to exist, but why write about her in that case?

The one interesting thing about this dreary book is the inclusion, as in all Mortimer’s books, of the authentic sexual lives of the characters.  Phyllis, genteel as she is, is a sexual being, which the handyman senses and acts upon (although he’s a creepy and incompetent seducer, parading before her with his “private parts” bulging “through the thin cotton” of “his patterned underpants.”).  But Penelope Mortimer is no kinder to Phyllis than the handyman, and so this book is mean and sour.

The Flight of the Pelican by John Hopkins (Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press, 1983)

I had very much admired two other books by John Hopkins, which I had read many years ago: Tangier Buzzless Flies and The Tanger Diaries 1962 – 1979, a non-fictional and fictional account of the time Hopkins spent in Moroccoo in the ’60s and ’70s.  These books are both artful and intelligent, and written with considerable artistry and skill.

Unfortunately I did not think The Flight of the Pelican was anywhere near as good as  those two books.  It’s an overwrought adventure novel,  set in an imagined South (or Central) American country, where everything and everyone is larger than life and simultaneously  comic and lurid.

Jonathan Bradshaw, the good-for-nothing scion of a wealthy and well-connected New England family, journeys to Puerto Gosano in search of his father, who sailed south 25 years ago, disappeared, and is assumed to be dead.  But when his sailboat, the Pelican, is found  the family believes he might still be alive in the jungles of Puerto Gosano, and dispatch Jonathan forthwith. 

Jonathan creates a lot of (unbelievable) mayhem and encounters a lot of terrible things ( vampire bats, a house full of genetically-deformed orphans, feral dogs, vultures), before finding his father, who is indeed living in the jungle with his ferocious knife-wielding common-law wife, and suffering from a terrible rotting skin disease brought on by unsanitary jungle life.

The first two-thirds of the book are somewhat engaging, but when Jonathan finally encounters his father, most of the buoyancy and energy dissipate and the final third of the book (like the tail-end of so many journeys) is tedious and exhausting.  Hopkins writes alluringly about geography and flora and fauna, and this gives the book a consistent sensual vividness, but it is not enough to sustain a reader’s interest, for the world of the book, though well evoked, is finally too unreal and arbitrary to engage a reader’s attention or sympathy.

 

John Hopkins (l) and Joe McPhillips (r)

 

A Source of Embarrassment by A. L. Barker (Hogarth Press, 1974)

Another fascinating book by this interesting and idiosyncratic writer; I think that I  liked this best of the three I have read.  There is something antiseptically bracing about A Source of Embarrassment that makes reading it both disturbing and delightful.

The source of embarrassment is a middle-aged Englishwoman, Edith Trembath, who lives with her husband and two children in some provincial city or town in England.  She is a difficult character to describe, partly because she is so unusual and partly because Baker doesn’t strive to reveal her characters: she observes them dispassionately from a distance. 

At the beginning of the book Edith is diagnosed with a brain tumor and told she has three months to live, and the book explores how both she and her family and friends respond to this tragic situation.  Complicating matters is the fact that Edith is a pathetic figure of fun to everyone she knows.  They all mistake her clumsiness and her inability to detect sarcasm or irony or scorn as proof that she is some sort of imbecile — even her children and husband, though fond of her, patronize and marginalize her.  It is only the reader, who observes her at a slightly different angle, who can discern her integrity and true worth.

This book is also inclusive of its characters’ varied sexual lives.  Attention is paid to everyone of them, and there is frank and candid mention of incest, impotence, and adultery.  In this way, the book seems very adult and ahead of its time.

Barker’s writing is, as always, funny and brilliant.  Her tone is unique, although at moments this book made me think of both James Schuyler’s What’s For Dinner and any number of Iris Murdoch novels.  I’d  like to read this book again, for Barker’s writing isn’t always easy to comprehend or appreciate, and I feel that a second reading would reveal many additional delights and satisfactions.

Down Below by Leonora Carrington (New York Review of Books, 2017; originally published by Dutton in 1988 as The House of Fear)

In 1940, Leonora Carrington was living with her lover, Max Ernst, in Provence.  When the Nazis invaded France, Ernst was sent to a concentration camp and Carrington “suffered a psychotic break.”

This memoir is a riveting and hallucinatory account of that breakdown, and her often barbaric treatment in a private asylum in Spain.  Carrington, who was also a talented and original painter, writes with passionate energy, and the reader begins to feel trapped inside the book’s nightmarish world.  A unique book.

 

 

The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson (Virago Modern Classics, 1985)

This book was originally published in 1961 by Anthony Blond Ltd.  It is the story of Josephine, a young woman who has  a “nervous breakdown” while a student at Oxford and is sent to a “mental asylum.”  Her therapy there seems to be mostly confined to chats with a sympathetic German refugee nurse,  electroshock treatments, and long walks in the surrounding countryside.  And then she meets a young man, another patient at the asylum, who draws her out of herself, introduces her to the pleasures of sex, and then abruptly leaves her (and the asylum) without saying goodbye. But Josephine, despite her mental fragility, is a strong, resourceful, and oddly cheerful woman who takes her boyfriend’s abandonment in stride, as she does with her beloved and somewhat suffocating mother’s death.

It’s interesting to note that this book predates Sylvia Plath’s  The Bell Jar by two years, but deals with a similar character in a similar situation.  Joesphine is nowhere near as smart and savvy  as Esther Greenwood; in fact she’s rather dense about most things, and so this book lacks The Bell Jar’s poetic brilliance.  Nevertheless, it’s a quirky and interesting read, and Josephine is an original and engaging character (and narrator).

That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis (Harcourt Brace, 1956)

That Uncertain Feeling is Amis’ s second novel, published a few years after Lucky Jim. It’s a  comedy in much the same vein, about the misadventures, professional and romantic, of a young Welshman.  John Lewis is married to an unsentimental and practical woman names Jean.  They have two children (one only referred to as “Baby”), and John works as an assistant clerk in the local public library. His decision to apply for the job of sub-director leads to all sorts of comical mayhem, especially when he begins an affair with the elusive yet demanding wife of the Library Committee’s chairman.

Most of the characters in the book are selfish and unlikable, but they seem human, and Amis does a good job of creating farce around their botched assignations.  I laughed out loud several times while reading this book (which I rarely do).  Like Lucky Jim, it leaves a bitter aftertaste, but the darkness is better integrated in this book and it is far less misogynistic.