What Book to Read?

Mary Wesley’s first adult fiction, Jumping the Queue, was published when she was 71 in 1983, confounding the judgement of the several publishers who had turned it down on the grounds there was no interest in ‘that kind of book’. By this they meant books which focus on the lives of ordinary middle class English women, particularly their relationships with parents and children. Often these women face a crisis, and find ways to change their lives through the achievement of independence. Writers of this kind of fiction have in fact remained popular, along side the more gaudy creations of their post-modernist and post-colonial peers.

I was reminded of this when I picked up The Serpentine Cave, by Jill Paton Walsh (1997). It is the story of Marian Easton, who has lived a consciously ordered and restrained existence in reaction to the chaos of her mother’s life as a painter. Now her mother has had a stroke, and it is too late for Marian to ask the questions she wants answers for, such as who her father was. Is there now any way of finding out? Much of the story is set in St Ives, Cornwell, and there are lyrical descriptions of the sea and the beautiful, if decaying, old town. At the heart of Marian’s search for answers is the true story of the wreck of the St Ives lifeboat with the loss of all but one of the crew in 1939. The book rises to no great heights, but is certainly a very pleasant read.

Another writer in the same vein is Penelope Lively. Her most recent book is Family Album (2009), but I’m more familiar with her earlier work, such as Heat Wave (1996), a novel about a mother and daughter and the infidelity of their husbands, and Spiderweb, (1998) about an anthropologist who retires to the English countryside. Not all that much happens, but both have very sympathetic main characters who are interesting in themselves. Lively writes beautifully; there is close and nuanced observation at work.

And then there is the remarkable Mary Wesley herself. Jumping the Queue begins with a woman preparing the picnic that she is going to eat before she drowns herself. Then something happens to distract her from this. As in her other best known books, The Camomile Lawn (1984) and Harnessing Peacocks (1985), the drama is domestic, but none the less poignant and moving for that. And in Wesley’s books, the domestic can contain rage and violence as well as resignation and conformity.

These are the kind of books which the poet Philip Larkin suggested are what people ‘want to read instead of what they ought to read’ (though he was thinking particularly of the quirky romances of Barbara Pym). I think this domestic scale may well have greater appeal to women than to men, but I see no reason to look down on them because of this – as male publishers perhaps have done. That they are set in a now fast receding past doesn’t tell against them for me either. Explaining our own lives as we get older, as these women are doing, requires examination of the past which for me includes the period these are mostly set in; certainly the experience of these other women doesn’t seem like ‘history’ to me.

While none of these books is experimental in structure or voice, they are nevertheless very well written. These are all considerable writers. All three have been either long or short listed for prizes like the Booker, and Lively won it with Moon Tiger in 1987. Paton Walsh has been in the news recently for her Dorothy Sayers look-alike The Attenbury Emeralds (2010) which, yes, features Peter and Harriet Wimsey (nee Vane); this is clever ventriloquism which in no way detracts from her own voice.

You may need to search for some of these titles, but I don’t think you’ll be disappointed if you take the trouble to do so.

There is a very brief Wikipedia entry for Paton Walsh here, rather more for Mary Wesley here and for Penelope Lively here.