Flamingo, 1988, 138 p.

This book won the Booker Prize in 1979. However, it didn’t chime with me at all. It’s set in the early 1960s in a community of houseboat dwellers on a part of the River Thames known as the middle Reach and roams between various characters who all display a curious level of detachment.

Nenna took on the tenancy of the boat Grace while her husband Edward was abroad but on coming back he refused to step foot on it. He now lives elsewhere in London. Their children, Martha and Tilda, spend their time thinking of Cliff Richard and Elvis and roaming the muddy tidelines avoiding school. The marriage of Richard Blake and his wife Laura of the Lord Jim is shaky. Maurice (who has named his boat Maurice,) lives a shadowy life and allows a dodgy mate to use space on his boat to store stolen goods. Willis is trying to sell Dreadnought despite the fact it has a bad leak and has asked the others to conceal that.

The main thread running through the book is Nenna’s desire to have Edward return to her but her attempt to secure this ends badly, yet then he suddenly blunders onto another of the boats.

There was though at least one good line; about the ability of men to do nothing at all in an unhurried manner being one of the things they can do better than women. (I couldn’t help wondering what the other things – if any – are?)

I suppose I couldn’t get on with this for the same reason I have difficulty with appreciating Muriel Spark. Most of the characters seem opaque and unconvincing.

Pedant’s corner:- I did have a pedant’s corner for this but due to not posting this review soon after reading I cut them for the posting I do on Goodreads and a private blog. It was from the latter I recovered the review to put it on here.

Virago Classics, 1989, 345 p, plus x p Introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald. First published 1876.

This is the last of the author’s Chronicles of Carlingford and is set a generation or so after most of the previous books she set in that emblematic English town. Unusually we start in London where Phœbe Beecham – daughter of Phœbe Tozer, familiar from Salem Chapel – has been brought up by her parents. Her father had risen to be minister of “a handsome chapel near Regent’s Park” where the wealthiest and therefore most influential of his congregation is the overbearing Mr Copperhead who decides to throw a ball where Phœbe is the star turn. Also there is Ursula May, daughter of the incumbent at St Roque’s in Carlingford, in London at the invitation of her moneyed relations the Dorsets, and dazzled by the company. Copperhead’s son Clarence annoys his father by paying too much attention to Phœbe.

When news comes that her grandmother, Mrs Tozer, has become ill the stage is set for Phœbe to go to live in Carlingford. Her mother worries that otherwise her sister-in-law, being on the spot, will take advantage of the situation but also that people in the town will think Phœbe is stuck up and warns her to be careful. In the town the locum preacher at Salem Chapel, Mr Northcote, stirs up a meeting where he decries the appointment of Mr May’s son Reginald to a sinecure at a local college. Reginald had been swithering about the proprieties of this but the criticism steels him to take it.

Despite their religious differences Ursula and Phœbe soon strike up a friendship and indeed Reginald’s benign treatment of Mr Northcote leads to him becoming part of the company for evenings in St Roque’s parsonage.

A rather lurid sub-plot (Oliphant is partial to those) rears its head when it transpires that Mr May is in secret financial difficulty and a man called Cotsdean is implicated in this. A temporary resolution to May’s money worries presents itself when Mr Copperhead, desirous of eventually seeing Clarence become an MP, sends his son to be a pupil of Mr May as a kind of finishing school. This of course places Clarence and Phœbe in close proximity (a fact Mr Copperhead bewails when he eventually comes to hear about it.) However, the expense of feeding Clarence in the manner and style to which he is accustomed and Mr May’s perennial carelessness with money render the strategy null.

The dynamics of the life of the May family are well portrayed. May is a widower, Ursula acts as a kind of stand-in mother and her younger sister Janey slightly resents her greater status. Reginald floats over the top of it all. May himself is something of a despot, insisting on peace and quiet for his sermon preparations. Moreover, “Mr May … having a naturally bad temper … had attained the power of using it when it suited him to use it … A bad temper is a possession like another and may be made skilful use of like other things which, perhaps, in themselves, are not desirable.”

Once again we have the antipathies of Established and Dissenting Churches on display though these are expressed more on one side than the other, the resentment of the one matched by all but complete indifference. Though touched on in previous Carlingford novels the matter of station in life is reflected on more fully and the importance of money – or the lack of it in a gentlemanly setting – is a more salient feature here.

Though the titular character is Phœbe Junior, and she is the fulcrum of the novel’s resolution, many passages attend to elsewhere, illuminate various of the characters, widen the narrative. This is a portrait of sections of society (though not all.)

Phœbe is a well-balanced, clear-eyed woman. Knowing Clarence as the dullard he is she is aware of what she can do for him (as well as what his father’s money can do for her even against his objections.) She is pragmatic though, rather than calculating, and eminently practical. Not a typical nineteenth century heroine. She and Ursula are by far the most competent of the characters. The men, by contrast, just bumble along.

Like all Oliphant’s Carlingford novels (I have yet to sample any others of hers, though there are many) this has that wordiness typical of Victorian times. People remain people though, their troubles, loves and accommodations common to all eras.

Pedant’s corner:- some Victorian spellings such as dullness and idiotcy, the occasional missing quotation mark either before or after a piece of direct speech – and one extraneous one, a missing full stop. “the Miss Hemmingses” (several instances, the Misses Hemmings,) “the Miss Dorsets” (the Misses Dorset,) James’ (James’s.) “A an” (missing the ‘m’ of man,) “the Miss Griffiths” (the Misses Griffiths,) “byt he” (by the,) “blammg himself” (blaming himself – possibly a typesetting error, or an insufficiently inked printing press.)

Penguin, 2000, 89 p, plus vii p Introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald and i p Foreword by the author. First published 1980.

In the aftermath of the Great War, Tom Birkin, a veteran with a facial twitch as a result of it, takes on the task of uncovering a mediæval mural from the wall of a church in the village of Oxgodby in Yorkshire. The first person narrative of this slim but well-formed volume is in the form of recollections by Birkin in his old age and relates his interactions with the family of the Wesleyan local station master, the vicar Rev Leach (not at all keen on the disturbance and the potential effect on his flock of a vibrant painting on the wall of his church,) Leach’s wife, and a fellow war veteran Mr Moon, an archæologist hired to try to find the tomb of a mediæval ancestor of the Miss Hebron who has funded both projects via a bequest. As he works on uncovering the mural and gets to know the locals Tom attains a kind of contentment.

A Month in the Country is no more than a novella but Carr packs a lot into it. Like Nan Shepherd’s, it is something of a quiet work, no pyrotechnics, no big issues addressed (except the aftermath of war.) It is also an addition to the literature of the ‘path not taken’.

Pedant’s corner:- As noted in the Introduction the local minister Arthur Leach is also referred to as Revd J G Leach – but Carr admitted to being a reckless proofreader. Elsewhere: mugsfull (mugsful?) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “‘Low, He comes with clouds descending.’” (Lo! He comes with…,) Mr moon (Mr Moon.)