Given the established good reputations of these three British novelists, one might assume that they would all be contenders for the next Man Booker Prize. Surprisingly, only Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach has made the long list, and that because it is wonderful. All three deal with that perennial topic, an examination of a personal relationship in the context of a particular set of mores, beliefs and customs in a particular era. On Chesil Beach is set in the early 1950s, and the other two hover between the Sixties and Seventies of the past century.
Swift’s novel, Tomorrow (Picador), is a great disappointment; it is in fact an annoying and tedious read. It spans one wakeful night in which Paula, the narrator, anticipates the morning when she and her husband are going to spill the beans to their teenaged twins about the truth of their conception. Paula muses over her life, marriage and family, while addressing the twins in her thoughts. It is potentially an interesting examination of what the links of blood and genes mean to us in daily life, but the whole meditation is rendered with such vacuous sentimentality that it is heavy going. The reader is propelled onward only by some slight curiosity as to what the secret might be, as Paula seems a decent and kind person who has probably been a perfectly good mother. Perhaps Swift intends his maddeningly sweet narrator as a fairly savage satire on good matrons in our midst. The novel is somewhat redeemed by a twist that turns the secrecy screw a notch further than one expects. As in Last Orders, Swift shows that people can live with secrets for many years, and justify them to themselves. So, nu?
In contrast, Engleby (Hutchinson) is a dark and engrossing read. Engleby himself narrates his life, taking us from his childhood as a working-class prodigy who has won a scholarship to a good naval preparatory school on to his student years at Oxford, and then his career as a journalist. It is set in the 1970s and recreates that era with demythologising acidity. Engleby has been propelled by egalitarian educational opportunity into a world he cannot cope with. Ostracised and tormented at school, he becomes a very strange young man. The pivotal event of his life is falling in love with a fellow student, Jennifer, with whom he seems to have very little hope of a real relationship. She subsequently disappears, on the same night that he has stolen her diary from her room.
Engleby recounts much about himself that is unsavoury, and the reader assumes that this is a frank confession of the whole truth — which it isn’t. But as the book proceeds, the boundaries between fact and fiction and the nature of human consciousness are examined. The reader is asked to consider at least whether the humiliations of crossing the class divide can damage a person as much as Engleby seems to have been.
This a gripping read, if sad. Engleby seems to be one of the lost boys of the Seventies; there are many interesting comments on politics, society, music of the times, and ideas around psychotherapy and “justice”. Near the end, when Engleby has had much time to review his life, he says: “As the electrical self-deceit of human consciousness ebbs and fires at random through my brain, there are long hours when I don’t know if I am alive or not.”
Engleby‘s narration is offset by excerpts from Jennifer’s diary, an entirely different take on things, by then existing only in his memory.
On Chesil Beach (Jonathan Cape) is a small gem. In it, McEwan delineates the wedding night of Edward and Florence at a hotel on the Dorset coast. Flashbacks are interspersed with the events of the evening; dinner is served in their rooms and they proceed to bed fairly soon. Cultural discrepancies add to the huge difficulty around sex as a forbidden topic. Misunderstandings, diffidence, ignorance, all work to undermine them, which is deeply saddening as they are truly fond of each other. McEwan evokes the complexities of sexual desire in a way that is both delicate and frank, and this is another of his novels in which a single event has life-changing consequences. It is written with limpid simplicity and draws one into the mindset of both Florence and Edward in that post-war era. Their heartbreaking foolishness follows them into the rest of their lives.
Clearly and unsurprisingly white male writers are alive and well in England, and many will welcome these thoughtful contributions to English fiction, especially those by Faulks and McEwan. All three novelists, however, venture into the territory of female consciousness with considerable success.
Book review
The Welsh Girl
by Peter Ho Davies (Houghton Mifflin)
Jocelyn Newmarch
This wartime novel of deceptive simplicity is Peter Ho Davies’s first, following two short story collections. It’s the story of Esther, the eponymous girl of the title, Karsten, a German soldier, and Rotheram, a German Jewish refugee who now works for British intelligence. Their lives intersect briefly when Karsten is interned in a prisoner of war camp outside Esther’s Welsh village in 1944.
The novel opens with Rotheram being sent to interrogate Rudolf Hess, who has spent the past three years in captivity and claims amnesia. The scenes with Hess are among the most mysterious in the novel; he appears an alternately pathetic and a teasing, knowing captive with a hold over his interrogator, who still does not accept his own Jewish identity.
From there, the action shifts to Esther, preparing to meet her boyfriend, an English soldier. Her dalliance must be kept secret from the locals, who hate the English presence in their village. Unlike her neighbours, Esther dreams of escaping and seeing the world. But like the sheep her father tends, she too has the gift of cynefin — the sense of place that ties her to her home, and that is passed from mother to daughter.
Then there’s Karsten, an object of ridicule for his fellow soldiers, after he surrendered to the English to save his fellows. The shame of defeat the Germans feel is displaced on to Karsten, the only one they can find who is, in their eyes, more dishonoured.
Love, war, nationality, surrender and shame are all explored within Ho Davies’s delicate prose. By the time they meet, Esther is as much a prisoner of circumstance as Karsten, but the possibility of love and freedom blossom.