Excellent Women, a novel by Barbara Pym

Having been won over to Pym’s work by Quartet in Autumn, I probably foolishly picked up another of her books — this an earlier one, set in the 1950s, still in the wake of the Second World War. While it is regarded as perhaps her best book, I found it less satisfactory than Quartet. 

One main character, Mildred, tells the story in the first person. She is a church-going spinster in her early 40s — not a character (for me) easy to identify with — but a spirited individual with a clear insight into the limitations of her current lifestyle.  A bit too much of the novel is concerned with details about the Anglican church and the characters who frequented them in the 1950s.  However, other aspects of the storyline do shed a light on the way people then thought about relationships and how important the concept of marriage was, particularly to women. 

If you want a novel with an exciting plot, this is not it.  But, again, I found myself enjoying Pym’s clever characterisation and humorous observations of everyday life. Mildred becomes a person one really cares about and wants to continue to be acquainted with even when the novel comes to its rather indecisive end. 4*

Quartet in Autumn, a novel by Barbara Pym

This was recommended to me and I was sceptical as I assumed the novel would be a light read on the subject of the anxieties of the English middle-classes. However, as soon as I started, I was immediately drawn by Pym’s ability at characterisation and to maintain the reader’s interest in the subject matter, even although it is in fact about the anxieties of the English middle classes.

The quartet of the title of this book from 1977 is a group of four elderly people — Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia — who are about to retire from their ill-defined office job that they have held together for many years.  We follow each of them through their rather trivial lives both in and outside work and listen to the sad descriptions they bring back to one another in the office of how little they do at the weekends, or on short breaks, which they normally spend on their own. 

The intriguing thing about the novel is that Pym manages to build up with humour and real attention to detail, a kind of voyeuristic intrigue about how each of them manages their lives and their attempts to plan for their retirement. We very soon start to care about each of these unsympathetic characters.  Inevitably there are some surprises in the plot, some positive, some negative, and our expectations are challenged several times as, gradually, circumstances lead to the relationships between the characters taking a different direction. 

Any fuller review of the details of the story would make the novel sound quite uninteresting, which it is certainly not. I was won over. 5*

A Hunger, a novel by Ross Raisin

The most recent novel from this prize-winning author. I had read and enjoyed his 2017 book Waterline, but read a recent interview in which he bemoaned the difficulties even well respected authors have in getting adequate publicity and support for further works. This is shameful, as this is one of the best novels I have read for some time. 

One of the skills of a good author of fiction must be the ability to enable the reader to engage with, or relate to, the characters. In this novel, the main character is the narrator and the book is written throughout in the present tense, even although it alternates a dozen or so pages at a time between the present and the past.  In the present, Anita is a head chef in a top Michelin-starred restaurant where we see her at work (with a lot of detail about the food and the kitchen activities); at the same time she is trying to juggle with caring for a demented abusive husband dying after two strokes and with trying to further her own career. She is also dealing with a growing fondness for another man, who could become an important part of her future life and her career. 

The background to her current situation is exposed in multiple passages dated approximately two years apart in which we see her (still narrating in the present tense) as a teenage daughter of a mentally unstable woman on a deprived council estate. She has to care for her mother and deal with the tragic circumstances of her death.  Despite this background, she trains to be a teacher and meets her husband.  They have two children together, but the relationship becomes difficult as he resents her having a career and especially resents her choosing to leave teaching and to train as a chef. 

There is a critical incident in the novel where their four-year old son goes missing.  It is only for a relatively short time but that signifies the failure in their marriage and the start of feelings of guilt about her children and her role as a mother.  As the earlier sequences progress, they eventually catch up with the present and, in a very moving encounter with her then adult son, we see how she may manage to free herself from her past and create some sort of future. 

The skill of the author here is to provide a real insight into the mindset of the main character.  Details of her daily life are beautifully observed.  How, as a relatively young man, the author gets so deeply into the character of a middle-aged woman from a very different background from his own is extremely impressive. Thoroughly recommended. 5* 

Proof of My Innocence, a novel by Jonathan Coe

Decided to end 2024 by reading a popular comic novel for a change.  I had read Coe’s Middle England a few years ago without being impressed, but the reviews of his latest made it sound more interesting. 

The author himself has posted an explanation of the background to the novel.  He explains that he  wanted to try to write a story that was ‘real’, rather than wholly invented, in response to a not uncommonly held view that fiction is unreadable as it consists entirely of lies. He addresses this issue by setting the novel in real time against British political events which happen at various points, e.g. the election of Liz Truss, the resignation of Kwasi Kwarteng and the appointment of Rishi Sunak.  

Another string running through the book is a comment on easy-reading literature — the bland murder mystery. Coe always has some political references in his books and in this case the victim, Christopher Swann, is murdered in order to avoid his revealing the origins and activities of an extreme right-wing group that has well-hatched plans to dismantle and sell off the NHS.  The murder plot has all the characteristics of the popular fiction he tries sarcastically to emulate — suspects with identical initials, clues left behind by the victim, secret passages, etc.  

Overlying this is a case of identity theft and cover-up by the Old School/Cambridge University network. We have two amateur sleuths and we have a police detective with a comic name Pru Freeborn (Proof Reborn), and several other puns, including the name of the book itself, as ‘Proof’ also has the alternative meaning of proof, as in first draft of a novel. 

Some of these puns and cross-references are mildly amusing, but the book’s multiple themes don’t sit well together and I found that I wasn’t especially interested towards the end in finding out who the murderer was, or whether they were ever brought to justice. I needed to start looking for something better to read. 2*