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’.)

Piccolo, 1978, 157 p.

Nowadays this would be called a YA novel but it is well worth reading by adults. It is exquisitely written from a pre-adolescent’s point of view. Maria Foster is an only child somewhat neglected by her parents. In her head she talks to animals and inanimate objects and they answer back. She finds them more companionable than any adults she knows.

The book starts with the family on a car journey to take a holiday at Lyme Regis. On arrival at their rented house she can hear both a swing squeaking and, later, a barking dog which no-one else can.

Next door there is a large family also on holiday. Their boisterous behaviour discomforts Maria’s parents but from the vantage point of a tree at the edge of “her” house’s grounds she finds them intriguing. On a trip to the beach she is delighted by the fossils – particularly the ammonites – she finds and begins to learn their names from a book. Martin from next door discusses them with her and they become friendly.

On a visit to their landlady Mrs Shand’s house she notices a sampler stitched by a Harriet Polstead but completed by her sister Susan in 1865 and notes the resemblance to the house in the sampler to the one she is living in. In her head she begins to construct a tragedy which must have befallen Harriet involving a landslip by the beach. Her discovery in the garden of the remains of the swing compounds her forebodings. (Aftbodings?)

Her hearing of the swing and the dog is a light touch of fantasy lending the story an atmosphere of oddness but the writing is clear, precise and excellently done with the characterisation of everyone involved pin-sharp.

This won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award in 1976. I can see why.

Pedant’s corner:- “between hedge and a somewhat unkempt shrubbery” (between a hedge and,) reptilean (x 2, reptilian.)

Penguin, 1990, 214 p.

Helen and Edward Glover have into middle age lived with their overbearing mother Dorothy (from whose clutches their younger sister Louise had long since escaped by marriage) in a crumbling pile called Greystones which has an accompanying area of land known as the Britches. The novel starts at Dorothy’s funeral with Helen reflecting, “Eternal life is an appalling idea, especially in mother’s case,” and thereafter traces the lives of Helen and Edward in the following weeks. Helen has a part-time job at the local library, Edward teaches at a nearby girls’ school but it is their inner lives which foreground the book.

In its initial stages the novel is deceptively light in tone, like a cross between The Shell Seekers and The New Moon with the Old, but as it progresses it develops an accumulation of detail which underpins its seriousness.

The terms of Dorothy’s will come as a shock. She has left Greystones to Louise’s teenage son Phil, now in that rebellious stage, adorned by a black crest of hair streaked with green, but with Helen and Edward having the right to live in the house until death. Only the Britches has been left to the Glovers. This is in one sense suitable as Edward has always felt more at home with nature than people (“the natural world thinks nothing and neither laughs nor cries,”) awkward at dealing with the world, and Helen is increasingly brought into the company of solicitor Giles Carnaby through dealing with the probate. She finds herself falling for him. She still sometimes sees her mother in the house and hears Dorothy’s voice in her head commenting on her foolishness. Dorothy’s classification of girls had been, “Pretty was best, clever was worst.” Her disparagement of any friend – especially male – Helen might bring home made sure she stopped doing so. While clearing out a cupboard Helen finds that Dorothy many years ago, by accident or design (but the narrative leaves little room for doubt which,) prevented an attachment developing by not passing over a letter Helen had received from Peter Datchett. Running in and out of the narrative is local builder Ron Paget, whose yard neighbours Greystones, and who is always out for the main chance and has perennially had his eyes on the Britches as ripe for development.

The interactions of the characters can verge on the seemingly mundane, Helen’s almost adolescent infatuation, her does-he doesn’t-he should-I-contact-him thoughts, Giles’s slipperiness, the hints at and revelation of Edward’s true nature, Louise’s battles with Phil, his blossoming at Greystones when he comes to get away from mum for a bit, Ron Paget’s persistent unsubtle attempts to wheedle the Britches out from under the Glovers, but the picture they build becomes more and more compelling.

I would say this does not quite achieve the heights of excellence which the same author’s Moon Tiger did but is another demonstration that quiet lives lived (more or less) quietly still have their dramas and deserve recording.

Pedant’s corner:- frequently commas were missing before pieces of direct speech, Windowlene (for the glass cleaner. It’s spelled ‘Windolene’,) a mack (this abbreviation for mackintosh is usually spelled mac,) “from whence” (whence means ‘from where’ so ‘from whence’ would mean ‘from from where’. I know the two words appear as such consecutively in the text of a hymn but that doesn’t make it correct.)

Hutchinson, 2001, 345 p.

Love, sex, and death, again. Literary fiction doesn’t seem to stray far from those. Though I suppose there isn’t that much sex here, and death is mostly off-stage. Set in the late 1950s as they turn to the 60s, the love is that between Mary van der Linden, sojourning in Washington DC with her diplomat husband Charlie (whose career has stalled somewhat, perhaps because he is too fond of the bottle) and journalist Frank Renzo who is making a slow return after disfavour in the McCarthy years.

The book does describe the progress of what I assume is supposed to be a great love affair but unlike in Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger I didn’t really feel it, was never convinced. When Mary states her feelings for Frank they more or less come out of the blue as far as the reader is concerned. (His affections – or perhaps I should say intentions – were discernible from the outset.)

To add a bit of colour incidents from the characters’ earlier lives are incorporated into the narrative – Mary’s first lover, who died in the Second World War, Frank and Charlie’s almost forgotten meeting at Dien Bien Phu – as are contemporary events, particularly the first Kennedy-Nixon TV debate and Charlie’s breakdown on a visit to Moscow which sharpens the tale with a dose of Cold Wear paranoia. And everybody smokes like a lum.

I remember the author’s earlier novel Birdsong with some affection. On Green Dolphin Street, while readable enough, is no Birdsong

I did though learn that there is a Dumbarton Street in Washington DC!

Pedant’s corner:- USian usages – fender, hat-check girl, laundromat, elevator, the fall, bake sale, sidewalk etc – but aluminium not aluminum and railways [sic] sleepers not railroad ties. Otherwise; Commonweath war cemetery (at the time it would have been an Imperial war cemetery,) “sluiced it down” (twice in the space of a page or so is once too many,) croci (crocus isn’t from Latin, so crocuses,) “under the instructions of a man with a crew-cut called Don Hewitt” (why does his hair-do have a name? A minor edit would have got rid of this,) “which even in this light she could see where shot with blood” (were shot,) on to (onto,) railways sleepers (railway sleepers,) sprung (sprang.)

Andre Deutsch, 1987, 211 p.

Claudia Hampton, a professional historian and, though unmarried, mother of Lisa, is on her deathbed. The doctor mentally notes that birth and an earlier miscarried child. While various important people in her life come and go at her bedside Claudia’s thoughts roam over her life. Her reminiscences are presented in the first person but sometimes scenes (even the same ones) are given to us in the third person from a different viewpoint. Claudia tells us, “I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy…. Chronology irritates me…. everything happens at once.”

She recognises her inadequacy as a parent and is pleased her daughter is not overly gifted, “Intelligence is always a disadvantage. Parental hearts should sink at the first signs of it.” The two most important of her relationships were those with her brother Gordon and with Tom Southern, the lover she met on a trip up to near the front during her stint in Cairo as a War Correspondent in World War 2. Love came on her as a surprise, “She has reached the ripe old age of thirty-one without knowing this particular derangement. For derangement is surely what it is; only by stern physical effort can she keep herself from looking at him, touching him.” This being wartime the affair ends abruptly. The child she miscarried was of course Tom’s.

So. Love, sex and death, here we are again. But Lively has conjured a wonderful book from those ingredients, well worth its Booker Prize win in 1987. Her treatment of the desert war is full of incidental detail rather than grand sweep and is more immediate for that fact. Tom tells her, “‘An astonishing amount of piety goes on out here. You’d be surprised. The Lord is frequently invoked. He’s on our side, by the way, you’ll be glad to hear – or at least it’s taken for granted that he is,’” and that, “we will win the war” – “‘in the last resort we have greater resources. Wars have little to do with justice. Or valour or sacrifice or the other things traditionally associated with them. War has been much misrepresented, believe me. It’s had a disgracefully good press.’”

Lively’s knowledge of Egypt is put to good use (the Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes) and the casual racist attitudes of the time are noted. “It was always mildly satisfying to see British racial complacency matched if not excelled by French xenophobia; the contempt with which Madame Charlot and her friends could invest the word arabe was more pungent even than the careless English ‘Gyppo’ or the curious pejorative use of ‘native’. It made us seem positively liberal-minded,” yet Claudia’s reflections on life conclude, “unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.”

There is more than a hint of the unusually close about the sibling relationship. “Until I was in my late twenties I never knew a man who interested me as much as Gordon did…. I measured each man I met against him, and they fell short. I tested myself for the frisson that Gordon induced, and it was not there.” This is underlined by the thought, “Incest is closely related to narcissism.” Plus we have, “I love you, she thinks. Always have. More than I’ve ever loved anyone, bar one. That word is overstretched; it cannot be made to do service for so many different things – love of children, love of friends, love of God, carnal love and cupidity and saintliness.”

Lively portrays very well the heightened awareness, the stark but total recall, of a passionate relationship. The descriptions of the remainder of Claudia’s life after Tom’s death – eventful and readable though they are – are subtly flatter. Her complicated relationship with Lisa’s father, Jasper, is also handled perfectly.

This is literary fiction at its best.

Pedant’s corner:- waggons (wagons,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, maw (as a mouth. It’s a stomach,) “The bridges wear necklaces of coloured lights; all along the banks the houseboats are ablaze, glowing against the dark, swirling patterned water” (this was in wartime Cairo. Surely it must have had a blackout. There was one in Alexandria. Then again, Lively was there herself during the war,) staunches (stanches.)