The hand that first held mine: am I the last person here to read this book?

Mystery, family secrets and bohemian London are three of my favourite things and I am fairly well chuffed to have discovered them, in combination in Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand that First Held Mine. I know that everyone else in the English speaking world read this ages ago, but there you are.

This is a story of two halves with elements of interplay and a last minute link that I will not spoil for those who have not yet had the pleasure. The first half is the story of Lexie Sinclair, convention-challenger and independent spirit of the 1950s. The second half belongs to Elina, young artist and new mother, and her boyfriend Ted who live in modern day Hampstead.

Books are often described as “cinematic” and most of the time I find myself thinking “well, feels more like a story in a book to me…” but not this time. The Hand that First Held Mine feels quite a lot like a film. The hoving in on the subject at the beginning swoops accurately like a camera: “Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and its almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen”. There are strange and unexpected flashes forward and flashes back. Very early in the book we are instructed to visualise the following: “Watch. Innes sucks in a nimbus of smoke, lifts a cigarette stub from the ashtray, appears to envelop Lexie in a shirt and push her across the room, the pillows jump on to the bed and they are both naked and, goodness, doesn’t sex look oddly the same in reverse”. Geddit? O’Farrell has a wonderful sense of people as actors, of life as reel.

There is a family mystery in this book which is not explained until then
end although I suspect that most readers will guess and get it roughly right. It is not an impenetrable puzzle but that makes it all the better. It speaks to me of how many little mysteries there must be, not all as dramatic as this one, in all families and under all noses. It also speaks of something that I for one find rather tantalising – the idea that places somehow “remember” events and that people can retrieve the long buried treasure of their memories by visiting them. This happens to Ted, subtly at first, and then dramatically. I wonder whether O’Farrell is suggesting that it is the place, or the action that has left the mark on the individual memory?

The book could easily be sub-titled “a disquisition on motherhood”, although this may not have encouraged sales. The actual title is a reference to the overwhelming power of the mother-child connection – a theme which is amply developed in the novel itself, and which I can readily recognise myself. A splendid read.

There are other opinions to be found at Harriet Devine’s Blog, Leafing through Life and The Sleepless Reader. Pictures are the book cover, the author and a random picture taken in Soho in the 1950s. If you feel a sense of recognition, there might just be a reason…

Someone at a distance: the book that nearly broke my heart

I started reading this book on the district line in snatched moments; I took it to Rome with me and read a bit there and on the plane. I am not sure when it was that this book started to grip me. At first I was thinking – ok so this is a domestic novel; like lots of Persephones it is almost achingly well written; there is a strong sense of the 1950s; it is very English; it is very restrained.

But somehow, somewhere, it transformed into a heart breaking work of staggering understated power. I cannot believe that when it was published it did not get a single review. It really did nearly break my heart. It also took me rather by surprise.

Its focus is the marriage of Ellen and Avery, an upper middle class, middle aged couple of the Home Counties in the early 1950s. It tells you straight on the back cover, and I am not really giving anything away when I say that their comfortable life is pretty much destroyed by the arrival of Louise; a French lady’s companion. Louise is a sort of serpent character. She is a truly horrible, self serving piece of bitterness and I can’t imagine that she has many fans amongst the reading public. Through her extraordinary personality she provides a relief, against which Avery and Ellen’s marriage is destroyed and then re-made in a tiny way.

Marriage as an idea emerges from the novel in an odd way. I think that Dorothy Whipple must have rather believed in it, without romanticising it at all. In the end, the marriage is destroyed but the underlying relationship is still there, albeit damaged. Whipple manages to keep in focus the true happiness of youth and at the same time, the rubble of separation. This is never clearer than in the following description of old ladies in a rest home: “In the dining room, where the shutters were closed against the night and the lamps on the tables lit under rosy shades, the old ladies waited to be served. They had read the paper, but Ellen couldn’t have come into gentler company. There was no avid curiosity, no malicious speculation, no self congratulation that such a thing couldn’t happen to them, as there might have been amongst younger women. These women were old, time had softened them, they had learnt something from loss, helplessness, loneliness; they knew that almost anything can happen to anybody. They were kinder than when they were young”.

I wonder if women like Ellen still exist? There were moments when I thought her rather timeless, and saw shades of people I know in her incredible reserve. At other times I thought – you know Ellen, there are times for dignity and times for fighting and if you want your husband back, however awful he has been, you should run after him. That however, would not have been “Ellen” at all. She is a real period piece. She is not a doormat; she is an old fashioned wife. As the character Mrs Beard memorably says to Ellen: “We’re not the new sort of women, with University degrees in Economics, like those women who speak on the radio nowadays, girls who can do anything. We’re ordinary women, who married to young to get a training, and we’ve spent the best years of our lives keeping house for our husbands”.

Other opinions can be found at A Striped Armchair, Stuck in a book and Fig and Thistle. The pictures are the Persephone Classic edition, the Persephone endpaper and the author.

Pottering with Pym: Excellency amongst women and novelists

I have just finished Barbara Pym’s novel Excellent Women over a cup of tea, in somebody else’s home whilst marooned in London due to snow, and just for a moment, albeit a short one, I identified with its heroine, the inestimable Mildred Lathbury. I am happy, but not quite settled. I take the view that a cup of tea solves most problems but I know that it doesn’t solve them all. I am looking around at the snow caked city and thinking – well – let’s just wait and see.

Mildred is a bit like that. She is the narrator of this excellent novel in which she reveals her character and her place in the world by gentle turns and subtle humour. Mildred is a clergyman’s daughter who has found herself over 30 and unmarried in an age when that usually meant that you could forget your chances in the marriage market. She is not at all rich but she is firmly middle class. She lives in a flat which shares its bathroom with others. She is extremely churchy – her closest friends being the local vicar and his spinster sister. Mildred volunteers and helps and sorts and mucks in and is generally a self contained, self sufficient woman upon whom everyone seems to depend.

Enter stage right a considerable amount of disturbance in the form of Mildred’s new neighbours, Rockingham “Rocky” and Helena Napier. Helena is a spirited anthropologist who is more interested in the origins of civilisation than in being a “proper” wife 1950s style. This state of affairs has poor Mildred completely flummoxed, not least because Mrs Napier’s husband Rocky is rather lovely. He has spent the war in Italy – Mildred imagines charming Wrens.

This book is largely about the distinction – now very little but then a vast chasm – between married and unmarried women. At the beginning of the book, Mildred comments disarmingly “Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women, who tell their stories in the first person”. That is to say - reader don’t expect an “I married him” moment.

The distinctions which Pym illustrates have mostly to do with status and position. One that really fascinates is the dividing of the married and the unmarried between the passive observers and the active non-observers. According to one of her fellow unmarrieds: “We, my dear Mildred, are the observers of life. Let other people get married by all means, the more the merrier”. He lifted the bottle, judged the amount left in it and refilled his own glass but not mine. “Let Dora marry if she likes. She hasn’t your talent for observation”.

Other excellent opinions are to be found at Dovegreyreader, the Red Room library and the wonderful My Porch. I have included a picture of the front cover of the latest Virago edition, and the lady herself, together with a slightly grumpy looking cat.