Tag Archives: Jonathan Cape publishers

Tessa Hadley, Late in the Day

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Tessa Hadley, Late in the Day, Jonathan Cape hb 2019, 280 pp.

Two couples negotiate bereavement, infidelity and parenting: the basis of many if not most novels. The ‘novel’ part is what the writer does with this familiar basis to raise it above the mundane and predictably ordinary. Tessa Hadley tries perhaps a bit too hard to do this with her quartet of self-absorbed middle-class characters, and the result isn’t entirely satisfactory – but there are some redeeming features.

The novel begins with the bereavement I mentioned, and what follows is an account of the fallout this causes in the three survivors who were closest to the deceased. Fissures in their relationships deepen as a consequence, and the uneasy equilibrium of their lives is disturbed irretrievably.

A series of flashbacks gives us the back story to all this. One of the women, Christine, has a record of not finishing things: a PhD that was abandoned, a potential career as an artist given up, perhaps temporarily, because of self-doubt and an unsupportively critical husband. Her best friend Lydia is vain and selfish, and all of these factors play a part in the tumultuous after effects of the bereavement.

Tessa Hadley pulls all this together skilfully and with some well-crafted prose. It’s just that I couldn’t really care too much what happens to these characters through the ill-judged or self-serving choices that they make.

There are some fine passages of description of the setting (mostly London – and its growing population of raucous parakeets), and interesting details about several of the characters’ attempts to produce works of art in various media. There’s this, for example, about Zachary, whose wealthy parents were ‘enthusiastic patrons of the arts’ and were able to provide useful connections. Zachary was later the owner of an art gallery, but in his younger days ‘was struggling with a novel’ and the creation of ‘light-box installations’ which had attracted the attention of editors and galleries (thanks to those influential parents and his own ‘resilient good luck and his charm’) – but like Christine, mentioned above, ‘he hadn’t finished anything yet’:

[His friend Alex] didn’t think Zachary had the necessary cruelty that made an artist, or the incompleteness in himself. He was too rounded and too hopeful. His work was derived from his enthusiasm for the arts, which was all upside down. But then Alex’s ideas about an artist’s life were based naturally on his own father, whose gifts [as a novelist] had been so bitterly unfulfilled.

This passage says a lot ostensibly about Zachary and his shortcomings, but also about Alex, through whose consciousness this is filtered.

Passages of this calibre do appear elsewhere in the novel, but they serve to highlight the less inspiring majority of the narrative.

I was much less impressed by the other Tessa Hadley novel I’ve posted about here: The Party. There’s a brief note on it from a couple of years ago HERE.

 

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know

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Ian McEwan, What We Can Know. Jonathan Cape hb 2025. 301 pp. Library copy

I’ve always been drawn to and (mostly) enjoyed the novels of Ian McEwan. In What We Can Know, his latest, he’s even more ambitious than usual, and there’s a strong literary element, in that a central character is a famous (fictitious) poet of the late 20C-early 21C: Francis Bundy, said to have been up there with Seamus Heaney.

The novel deals in the first half with the nature of biography, hence the title. The protagonist here is Tom Metcalfe, a literary scholar specialising in the period 1990-2030. So yes, it’s a sci-fi novel of sorts, in that it’s set in 2119, and the times we live in now have become as distant and different as the Bloomsburys are to us. He’s employed at the University of the South Downs, and he has gone to the Bodleian Library in Snowdonia. After a disastrous series of nuclear conflicts, which have exacerbated the effects of climate change, Britain (and most of Europe) has been inundated, and the habitable territory reduced to a few dozen square miles of former high ground.

I suppose dystopian novel of the future would be a better genre description than ‘sci-fi’. McEwan works in a lot of grim stuff about the lack of creature comforts and technology we take for granted today: food and other basic resources are limited in scope, transport is largely by ferry and boat, and nature has been decimated.

Tom’s on a quest to track down a long-lost poem by Blundy, a ‘Corona’, a sequence of 15 linked sonnets dedicated to his wife Vivien. He’d read this poem aloud to her and their guests at her 54th birthday party in their rural barn house. He’d handwritten it on a piece of vellum, and there were no copies. By its ‘non-existence’ it had in the century that passed ‘become a repository of dreams, of tortured nostalgia, futile retrospective anger and a focus of unhinged reverence.’

The poem, through no merit of its own but the folly of its admirers, had leapt its bounds to plunge into the mire of political economy, global history and suffering.

With its references to wild flowers, country picnics and river swims, it had taken on the kind of pastoral, idyllic reputation of the poetry of the great Romantics, and Blundy – and in particular this dinner-party ‘corona’ – was seen in the tradition of Wordsworth and Keats. Tom has spent countless hours wading through digital and other archives of largely trivial journals and records of the time, attempting, as all biographers do, to tell a story about a long-dead person’s life that combines textually attested evidence with imagination.

His quest takes him to some dangerous places, and his obsession causes him to neglect his personal relationships. He feels more affinity, in some ways, with biographer Richard Holmes in his account of reproducing RL Stevenson’s travels in the Cevennes with a donkey than he does with his wife.

We hear a great deal about the guests at that birthday dinner. As the novel progresses our perception of their relationships with each other and with the Blundys shifts dramatically, and our view of Tom’s quest and the legendary lost poem MS shifts with it. McEwan handles all this with gusto, and it’s hard not to keep turning the pages to see where he takes us with this motley cast of characters, past and present.

Then the narrative in part two is taken over by another voice, and the novel becomes something very different again. A whole new dynamic replaces what we thought we knew about that dinner party, its hosts and its guests. Plot twists and revelations resemble those found in golden age crime fiction – but all narrated with McEwan’s customary edgy originality.

This was an immersive, rewarding reading experience, yet after finishing it I felt a little like one does after eating a delicious dessert: deep pleasure followed by a realisation that it wasn’t really very nutritious. Some of the dystopian tropes, the surprises and uncovered secrets in the plot seem, in retrospect, too contrived, and the characterisation implausible. But there’s no denying McEwan’s mastery of his material, and ability to tell a cracking good story.

Most of my reading of McEwan was done pre-blog. I posted a brief note on his 2023 novel Lessons HERE.

Bernard MacLaverty, Midwinter Break

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Bernard MacLavery, Midwinter Break. Jonathan Cape, London, hardback. 2017

Another novel read in a day while I convalesced after recent medical treatment. It takes some getting into, with a rather bleak pair of central characters. The married couple, retired architect Gerald and teacher, Stella, are in the midwinter of their relationship. Will it survive their cathartic post-Christmas short break in Amsterdam, where the cracks in their marriage, and in their individual lives, widen, and the painful secrets in their past threaten to explode their outward calm?

MacLaverty W Break coverGerald is a drinker; Stella is searching for solace after an earlier terrible trauma. He’s either unaware of her pain, or has drunk himself into numbness to avoid confronting and dealing with it – and his own. She sees this in him, and is tired of watching him drink. She wonders if she still loves or needs him.

That’s about it as far as plot goes. It’s a slowly accreting, sympathetically and delicately observed portrait of two people clinging on to the wreckage of their relationship, damaged by the Troubles in N. Ireland from the 70s onward, where their Catholic faith marked them obtrusively in the conflict they deplored. Events in this violent past nearly destroyed them.

In deceptively plain prose, MacLaverty pieces together an impression of a marriage full of unspoken grief and deeply felt, barely suppressed emotion. It’s one of the most haunting accounts I’ve read of the ways people strive to communicate but often fail to connect – even when they’re desperate to do so.

He’s particularly adept at selecting and delineating the minutiae of their daily lives as they age and try to face their new, retired life without the stimuli of work or bringing up family – their only son has grown up and moved abroad with their much missed grandson (it’s fairly clear why).

The way the novel opens is typical of this narrative technique: Stella and Gerald are in their home in Scotland (they’d long since left Ireland), preparing for bed. He’s finished in the bathroom and leaves the shaving mirror at the magnifying face. Why are we given that detail? Was he being considerate, knowing she’d need the magnified side of the mirror to carry out her facial restoration regime? Or was he simply examining his own face, heedless of her own? MacLaverty leaves the options open.

This passage continues:

She licked the tip of her index finger and smoothed both of them [her eyebrows]. Then turned to her eyelids. She was sick of it all – the circles of cotton wool, the boiled and sterilised water in the saucer, the ointments, the waste bin full of cotton buds.

At first sight this is just a list of banal details – but MacLaverty is sharp-eyed enough to notice how Stella feels the need to try to hold back the ageing process, with particular emphasis on the eyes – the windows of the soul. More importantly, that final sentence reveals her simmering impatience. The symbolic waste-bin represents perhaps her life, and her life with Gerald. Yet the point isn’t laboured; on the contrary, it’s unobtrusive – just there, like Stella and her pain. And what exactly is the ‘all’ that she’s sick of: the attempts to hold back the effects on her face of ageing, or Gerald and her life with him – or life in general? MacLaverty delicately refrains from telling us, leaving us to figure out for ourselves what’s wrong here, what’s going on in these troubled lives.

Her bedtime routine is completed when she gets into her pyjamas quickly, because the room is cold: ‘She saw no point in paying good money to heat a room all day for a minute’s comfort last thing at night.’ This penny-pinching at the expense of her own comfort indicates her self-castigating, frugal nature, her inability to expand, indulge. The slow drip of such details through the narrative gradually, like an accumulating stalagmite, shows why she’s like that, so pinched, self-denying.

As she basks in bed, warmed by her only, limited indulgences – hot water bottle and electric blanket — we are privy to her thoughts: she loves this ritual hour of ‘separation at the end of every day’. Gerry (as she would call her husband; these are clearly her thoughts, relayed through free indirect discourse) ‘out of action, in another room…Having a nightcap, no doubt. Or two or three.’

Even in this rare moment of sensual abandonment in her solitary bed, she can’t help this frisson of judgemental scorn and bitterness. What’s so poignant is that the behaviour of each of them precipitates such reactions in the other; the ways they deal with their own personal demons drives the other one away, at the very points when they need each other most, like magnets of the same polarity.

It’s easy to dislike Stella and Gerald, but gradually he’s seen to be guided by his wife’s star; redemption flickers and fades before them. I found myself hoping they’d not let it extinguish.

Trelissick and Carrick Roads

View over Carrick Roads from Trelissick gardens

Mrs TD read this after me, and struggled with the first third or so of the novel, but told me she was glad she persevered to the end – it picked up considerably.

Just to finish, a picture taken yesterday during our first walk at this local National Trust property in six months. One of our favourite views. Had to book a slot and maintain hygiene/social distancing measures, but worth it. And the sun shone.