A Son of the Rock

Viking, 1998, 220 p.

Stella Brentwood has retired to Somerset after her career as a social anthropologist which took her all around the world – Cardiff’s Tiger Bay interviewing Lascar seamen, the Nile Delta, Malta, Orkney.

She had a lifetime friendship with her fellow Oxford graduate Nadine. They were at University in the fifties when women students were still rare and in a sense exotic. They always had different attitudes to marriage. Nadine was keen on the idea but at the time opined, “‘Marriage is for later. The thing right now is simply – men. Here we are, surrounded by them. Spoiled for choice. The point is to make the most of it – we’re never going to have it so good again.’” To which Stella as narrator adds, “She’s right about that, at least,” though she seems never to have been short of opportunities herself. Though she later reflects, “Extraordinary process, pair bonding. Quite as arbitrary, really, among humans as among animals.” It’s mostly a question of who’s there when the time is ripe. It certainly was for Nadine whose outlook on the subject is entirely practical, saying marriage isn’t about grand passion. Looking back, Stella writes – using the past continuous tense – that, “Divorce is entirely familiar to the children of the fifties, but marriage is still viewed with disconcerting sobriety. It is seen as a permanent arrangement,” adding, “Well, they will find out.”

But Nadine is now dead and her widower Richard has surprisingly got in contact and offers help with first the move to Somerset, recommending a property in Kingston Florey, and then with lawn mowing and such.

Down the road from Stella’s cottage are the premises of T G Hiscox, Agricultural Engineers, where live Mr and Mrs Hiscox and their two sons. Mrs Hiscox is fiercely protective and controlling of her family. The boys in turn feel suffocated by her strictures and take any opportunities for petty acts of vandalism out of her sight.

Over time Stella has realised that “Most people require a support base … the ‘us’ that supplies common cause and provides opportunity for altruism and reciprocal favours and also for prejudice, insularity, racialism, xenophobia and a great deal else.” She has never had that; by choice.

Nadine had described her as detached – which is perhaps a good thing for a novelist to be – and, except perhaps for the local shopkeeper, she is disconnected from the inhabitants of Kingston Florey. An incident involving her dog makes her appreciate she is quite as alienated as the rest of them, on the outside looking in. (Richard reminds her that that was what she was trained for.)

She reflects that emotion recollected in tranquillity is more like it is recollected in clarity, without the helter-skelter feelings which accompanied that emotion in the past and feels that “It is not true that people diminish with age – it is those earlier remembered selves who are in some way pared down, depleted, like those who look out all unaware from old photographs.”

In fact Stella has had a complex of different relationships, some ongoing others not, none of which defines her. Spiderweb is in effect the tale of someone who refuses to be trapped.

Pedant’s corner:- “were able to buy honey and candles made by his bees” (candle-making bees would be an interesting sight,) “none of the army bases were nearby” (none … was nearby,) medieval (mediæval would be nice but I’d settle for mediaeval,) “what looks like the foundations” (what look like the foundations,) “to see from whence” (whence = ‘from where’ so from whence = ‘from from where’,) racialism (nowadays the word is shortened to racism,) “to hove into view” (hove is past tense; ‘to heave into view’.)