There is more to this wily novel than meets the eye. The Longley clan always speak in ‘half-shades and half-truths’ and thus Barbara Vine ends this novel … the other half of the truth being there for us to find out if we can.
Ruth Rendell was born in London and lives in Suffolk. Many of her novels have won awards and have been televised. A Dark-Adapted Eye won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award.
Age in year of publication: fifty-six.
Alice Walker 1944–
1982 The Color Purple
‘Take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me.’ This is the voice of Celie, who writes most of the letters in this novel. Her voice is vivid and strong, her intelligence is sharp. Although the novel is set in the American Deep South, whites appear in the book as a sort of afterthought; the book is more concerned with the relationships between black men and women, between Celie and her stepfather (who is the father of her children), between Celie and her wastrel husband, between Celie’s stepson Harpo and his wonderful wife Sophie and his second wife Squeak. These relationships are all fraught and difficult, if also various and immensely interesting, in sharp contrast to the relationships between the women, especially that between Celie and the singer Shrug, whom her husband loves and brings home and who eventually rescues Celie, which is tender and complex and sexual (it is clear from very early in the book that Celie is gay).
The other letter-writer in the book is Celie’s sister Nettie, the clever one in the family, who has escaped and gone to Africa and whose letters have been withheld by Celie’s husband. This relationship, too, is full of tenderness, love and warmth. Alice Walker risks a great deal with Celie’s voice — her spelling, for example, is often wildly inaccurate and there is an innocence about her observations which plays against her general shrewdness — but succeeds in creating one of the most memorable characters in contemporary American fiction.
Alice Walker was born in Georgia and now lives in San Francisco. The Color Purple won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1985.
Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
Sylvia Townsend Warner 1893–1978
1954 The Flint Anchor
There is no one quite like Sylvia Townsend Warner. She has her own way of looking at the world and a breadth of vision as open as the East Anglian sea and sky she writes about here.
In the early nineteenth century, Anchor House in Loseby, Norfolk, is the home of John Barnard, a house made of the dark flint of the area, as is the soul of the man himself. A man of lofty morality, he fears ‘nothing but God’, an emotion which sours his life and that of his family — wife Julia, sipping rum all day, and wimpish children, the Wilberforces and Euphemias of the time. But then there is his pretty daughter Mary, a serio-comic creation of the first order, who raises the pursuit of self-interest to a high art. Around them bustle those instigators of teas, dinners, walks, visits, attendances at church — not to mention the surprising fishermen of the village: inventive disturbers of all of those who live behind the sharp walls of the House of Flint.
Warner is not a romantic: she has a keen eye for malevolence and other flaws of the soul, yet she absorbs us totally in the personalities and daily concerns of her characters, unheroic though they be. Every novel Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote was entirely different from its predecessor in subject, period and story, but all of them are the work of a great English stylist, and all are diverting, funny and very, very clever. This little-known novel is a lost treasure.
Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in Harrow, Middlesex, and lived mostly in Dorset. She was a poet, novelist, short story writer and biographer. Her other notable novels are Lolly Willowes (1926), Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927) and The Corner That Held Them (1948).
Age in year of publication: sixty-one.
Evelyn Waugh 1903–1966
1952–1961 The Sword of Honour Trilogy
Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), Unconditional Surrender (1961)
This is a beautifully structured and deeply melancholy account of England and the Second World War, which also contains moments and scenes of pure hilarity. It is written in a spirit of great tenderness and tolerance and a sort of humility. Guy Crouchback is the scion of one of the great English recusant families now down on its luck. He lives alone in a castle in Italy. His wife, the irrepressible Virginia — a figure straight out of Waugh’s earlier fiction — has left him, marries twice more, and pops up throughout the trilogy to humiliate him. The first novel opens at the outbreak of war when Guy, at the age of thirty-five, returns to England and joins up. The trilogy then deals with his sensations and experiences. He is sensitive, watchful, loyal, good-humoured and a devout Catholic, but he is also distant, awkward, slightly priggish and self-centred. His character works superbly in the books because his loneliness and sadness are absorbed by the war, and his personality undergoes many tests and changes — he sees action in Africa, Egypt, Crete and Italy. The novels move fast in a series of short scenes; Waugh’s comic skills are used with great effect, especially in minor characters and the whole business of military operations and regulations. Guy’s father, retired now, living in a hotel by the sea, is one of the miraculous creations in the books.
Evelyn Waugh was born in West Hampstead, London. Most of his working life was spent in London and travelling until he finally settled in Somerset. He wrote many novels and travel books. They include Decline and Fall (1928), A Handful of Dust (1934), The Loved One (1948), Brideshead Revisited (1945) and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957).
Age in years these books were published: forty-nine — fifty-eight.
Fay Weldon 1933–
1980 Puffball
Fay Weldon’s role in late twentieth-century literature is that of the good witch, her special brew being woman and man, particularly when both are embroiled in marriage. In Puffball she adds to the potion by placing the marriage of Liffey and Richard within a larger structure, in which the spite of woman for woman is hilariously and lethally exposed.
Liffey is an excellent Weldon heroine — a good woman, kind and loving. Husband Richard is an ambitious advertising man, pompous in London, a bore when they move to the country, near Glastonbury, to breed. It is helclass="underline" the cottage is hell, the neighbours, Mabs and Tucker, are hell. Liffey’s womb takes on a life of its own as it battles to survive the general onslaught; and indeed there is no modern novel that so nimbly takes us through that rarely described experience, the biological stages of pregnancy, and the exact surgical instructions necessary to perform a Caesarean. If there is a message here, and all novels with happy endings like Puffball offer one, it is that women are biologically discriminated against by God, should he exist, and by Nature, if he doesn’t.