A Quiet Life by Beryl Bainbridge (George Braziller, 1977)

 

One of the most upsetting and depressing depictions of modern British domestic life I’ve ever read.  The (unnamed) family in question live in “genteel poverty” in a small seaside village on the west coast of England; the book takes place shortly after WWII.  The mother, who once attended a  finishing school in Belgium and has social airs, has been keenly disappointed by her husband’s lack of success in “commerce.”  He’s a damaged and ill man, comic and pathetic.  Madge, the 15-year-old daughter, is practical but runs wild, pursuing a damp and dark affair with a German POW every night down on the beach.  Most of this is observed by Alan, the 17-year-old son, whose attempts to save all these desperately damaged people is both noble and tragic.

The house they inhabit is like a fifth character in the book.  Impossibly cramped and cold, it offers no comfort or shelter, and all the family members find ways of escaping it.  When they are crowded together in its tiny rooms, they are cruel and bitter, and violence runs just beneath all of their interactions.  Bainbridge writes about all of them with a clear-sighted sensitivity that allows the reader to bear the misery and sadness that permeate the book.  She keeps a lot hidden from the reader, which makes the book seems somewhat slight and underdeveloped, but the final effect is quietly devastating.

When the Snow Comes, They Will Take You Away by Eric Newby (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971)

A wonderful antidote to The Occasional Man (see below), this memoir about the year an escaped English prisoner of war spends hiding out in the Apennines in northern Italy in 1943 is a beautiful and heartwarming book, and is a very moving testament to the innate nobility of the common man.

The dirt poor (literally) Italians who risk their lives shepherding and sheltering Newby act with unqualified and natural dignity and goodness, and Newby’s sensitivity and acute powers of observation and description do them justice.  He is an appealing character himself: modest, grateful, pragmatic, and good humored, and his book, although written a long time after the fact, is vivid and utterly engaging.  He is equally fine at describing people and places, and When The Snow Comes, They Will Take You Away contains a gallery’s worth of indelible portraits and images. 

There is evil lurking all around the edges of this book, and extreme hardship and deprivation on almost every page, and this makes the human goodness at its center all the more miraculous and moving.  A beautiful book.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

A book I felt defeated by once or twice before, when I began it and couldn’t get past the first 100 pages, always feeling lost and confused and disengaged.  This time I persevered, and it was well worth the effort — but it is, for me at least, an effortful read, with as many uphill sections as downhill passages (which is of course as it should be on a worthwhile long-distance journey).

While I admire the scope and depth of the book, it is not a book I would claim to love, for there is something a little artificial and two-dimensional about the world of Middlemarch and the characters that inhabit it, a Dickensian broadness or lack of subtlety that separates me from them, and makes me constantly aware of the created nature of the world and the will of the author.  What I admired was Eliot’s ability to create complicated and compelling moral situations and dramatize them in a very fluid narrative fashion.  On that level the book is masterfully composed.  I just wish the characters were a little more nuanced, or that  Eliot liked some of them more (Rosamund, Casaboun) and some of them less (Dorothea).  As I read this book I often thought, admirably and somewhat longingly, of Trollope, missing his ability to create shaded, complicated characters, and not settle for what is obvious or easy or to push the reader towards certain conclusions and predispositions.

But there is a great moral current moving through Middlemarch — namely Dorothea’s wish to to live a good, beneficial life that is admirable and compelling, and finally moving.  But I felt the need for it to be undercut or modulated by something bitter or darker or more truthful — a bit more of Mrs. Cadwallader’s acid wit and honest cynicism.

Symposium by Muriel Spark (Houghton Mifflin, 1990)

An elegant (of course), but under-sustained and underwhelming late and minor novel by Spark.  Hurly (an American painter, male) and Chris (a rich Australian widow, female) are giving a dinner party for ten people in the elegant London home were they happily cohabit.  We get scenes of dialogue from the dinner itself interlaced with scenes of “back story”, both past and recent, of all the guests.  The most attention is paid to a Margaret Damien, a young Scotts woman recently (and somewhat suspiciously) married to the heir of an Australian female business magnate of vast fortune.  Margaret is something of an Angel of Death (although she has a brief stint as a nun in a peculiar London convent); she seems to conjure, or perhaps arrange, death wherever she goes.

Although the many splintery shards of this book fail to add up into anything compelling or coherent, it’s all written with Spark’s frosty witty slyness and panache.  But lots of it seem second-rate, and carelessly conceived and executed.  A brief, harmless, disappointment.

Therese Raquin by Emile Zola, translated by Robin Buss (Penguin Classics, 2005)

Therese Raquin is a thoroughly unpleasant story.  Two lovers, Therese and Laurent, murder her invalid husband so that they might marry one another, but end up killing themselves, overcome with guilt and hatred.  Zola seems to think he’s presenting these characters and their situation in a new, unbiased, scientific way.  There are constant references to their temperaments rather than their characters, which only seems to generalize rather than to individualize them.   Zola is neither empathetic nor insightful, and all the characters remain flat, unnuanced, and undeveloped.  Add to this a lot of static repetition of detail and narrative action, and the book seems almost deliberately written to repel the reader.  It’s perversely fascinating for that reason, and readable, but neither enjoyable nor enlightening.

The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 by Cleone Knox (D. Appleton & Co., 1926)

 

This book, published in 1926, purports to be the (edited) diary of a real person, namely Cleone Knox, recorded over the year of  1764-1765.  The daughter of a wealthy Irish family, Cleone spends her twentieth year traveling from Ireland to London, Bath, France, Switzerland, and Italy with her doting father and deadbeat brother (her mother is dead).  She adroitly and amusingly records details of her travels and impressions of the many people and places she encounters in lively, bright, and very descriptive prose.  Her journey is full of event and romance(s), and reading this book is entirely delightful and transporting.

A Dog’s Life by Michael Holroyd (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969)

A dark, funny, small book — a day in the life of a (literally) decaying eccentric British family recorded with a bracing ruthlessness that keeps the sentimental aspects of the story — a dying and, finally, dead, dog — from cloying, and is in fact quite touching.

The Farquhars, based on Holroyd’s own family, live on seriously diminishing means in damp, faded, and crumbling gentility somewhere in suburban England in the 1950s.  The book follows them all — Eustace, the patriarch; Ann, his wife; Mathilda, his much younger maiden sister; Henry, his son, Miss Toth, an ancient nursemaid; Kenneth, his grandson; and Smith, the family’s beloved dying dog — through a single day.  All these characters (except Smith) are lonely and miserable, and spend all their time vexing and abusing one another, despite the wells of affection that have been so successfully repressed as to almost have been entirely forgotten.  But something about the ailing dog in their midst allows them to access shards of the affection and tenderness that secretly binds them, and a sort of heartbreaking, though repressed, epiphany is reached by one and all.

An unusual book in style, tone, and subject that I enjoyed reading and was strangely and deeply moved by, and admired.  Interestingly enough, the book, published in the US in 1969, was not until very recently published in the UK because Holroyd’s father threatened to sue for defamation.