A Son of the Rock

Wordsworth Classics. (In The Years & Between the Acts.)  2012, 302 p, including vi p Notes and a xix p Introduction to both books by Linden Peach. The Years was first published in 1937.

This is another book with an unusual chapter structure. Here the sections – of varying length –  are dated 1880, 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, 1918 and Present Day (which would be 1937) and overall offers us fragments from the life of Eleanor Pargiter. It’s not quite a family saga but getting on for it. While spanning the years, the novel is not broad in scope (the Great War for example happens off-stage) and – though wider events are referred to in passing – the narrative limits itself to goings-on within the family.

Each chapter/section starts with a description of the weather on the day concerned (except for the first section, events confine themselves to that day.) The narrative is accompanied by Notes which explain things or institutions of which the reader is presumably assumed to be unaware though it is hard to see how anyone British would not understand references to the Palace, the Bar, the Bodleian, Balliol, Gladstone, Whitehall etc.

Eleanor is one of the daughters of Colonel Pargiter. He has one hand restricted in use due to losing fingers in the Indian Mutiny. In 1880 the family lives in comfort in Abercorn Terrace but Mrs Pargiter is dying. The Colonel has a mistress, Mina, about whom he feels a degree of guilt but who is necessarily kept secret from his children.

Deaths toll through the first few sections, of Mrs Pargiter, of Charles Stewart Parnell, of the King (Edward VII,) and of a servant’s dog, but in a novel titled The Years how could it not? The emphasis on personal life indicates that though history sweeps on people get by and do what they have to, live their lives regardless. Some of the family fall into reduced circumstances after the colonel’s death but most carry on their resolutely middle-class existence.

Social attitudes of the time are signalled by use of the word Jewess, the comment “‘They do love finery – Jews,’” a reference to dagos – the relevant note does say that’s offensive – and the description “‘burnt as brown as a nigger.’” We also have that Victorian use of a line in place of someone’s, or a place’s, name, as in “Miss —.”

As a portrait of a certain stratum of society in the late Victorian, Edwardian and post-Great War eras this is fine but it’s not startling, nor indeed particularly memorable.

Pedant’s corner:- staunched (stanched,) “rigging thing’s up again” (rigging things up,) “the grisled, crumpled red-and- yellow face” (grisled is an obsolete form of grizzled,) “the metre” (of a taxi. That’s spelled ‘meter’,) “he sunk his head” (sank.)