Several characters in search of a plot – The Country Life by Rachel Cusk

The Country Life by Rachel Cusk presents several promises, but eventually seems to break most of them. When Stella Benson, a twenty-nine-year-old, leaves home suddenly to take up a private care assistant’s job in darkest south England, it is clear that she is running away. From what we do learn later, but by then we perhaps care rather less about the circumstances.

From the start there was a problem with the book’s point of view. Stella presents a first person narrative couched in a conventional past tense. Events – albeit from the past – unfold along a linear time frame, but despite her removed perspective, she apparently never reflects beyond the present she reports. Given Stella’s character, this may be no more than an expression of her scattered immediacy, but that only becomes clear as we get to know her via her actions. This apparent contradiction of perspectives has to be ignored if the book is to work, but once overcome The Country Life is worth the effort.

 Stella - to say the least – is not a very competent person. But then no-one else in this little southern village seems to have much about them. She becomes a live-in personal carer for Martin Madden, a disabled seventeen-year-old who lives with his rather dotty parents on their apparently luxurious farm. Stella has neither experience, nor presumably references, nor the pre-requisite driving licence. Her employers don’t check anything, despite their reported bad experiences in the past.

Thus Stella becomes part of a rather mad family called Madden. Stella steadily learns more about the Maddens. They have their past, both collectively and individually. Pamela, a wiry, sun-tanned matriarch, is married to Piers. They have children, all of whom seem to have inherited different mixes of the foibles on offer. There’s a local scandal or two, rumours of mis-treatment, sexual impropriety and more, but it always seems to dissolve into innuendo. This, perhaps, is the country life. Stella herself is incompetent in the extreme. She gets sunburnt - in England(!), soils her shoes with melted tar from the road, gets drunk several times, falls into the pool, gets lost, cuts up her clothing, behaves inappropriately, steals on demand and can’t find the garden gate. It’s quite a week.

As the book progresses, it seems unsure whether it should be a sit-com or a farce. But at the centre of The Country Life is Stella’s developing relationship with Martin. He is used to being the centre of attention and knows how to play the part, how to manipulate. He may, it seems, have inherited much from his mother and perhaps a lot less from his father. The Country Life is beautifully written. It is both funny and engaging. Stella’s life becomes increasingly a farce, however, and this crowds out some of the other themes that might have come more interestingly to the fore. Rachel Cusk’s writing is always fluent, perhaps overdone here and there, but when you are that good at it, a little over-egging just adds to the richness.

Sacred Country by Rose Tremain

Rose Tremain’s Sacred Country is a novel set in Swaithey, a small place in Suffolk in the rural east of England. It’s a long way to a big city – in British terms that is, an hour perhaps or two to London at most! Local industries are small and livelihoods have traditionally arisen largely from the land. In some ways Swaithey might represent nothing less than the countryside idyll, the epitome of the perfect place to be at one with nature and oneself, the kind of place where day trippers from the smoke might imagine a life with fewer complications.

But as we get to know Swaithey’s inhabitants one by one, we discover a village of strangely isolated individuals. They seem to be constantly searching for an identity their isolation denies them and, though they are forever conscious of their place in space and time, they seem to seek only internalised goals. And, of course, these goals keep changing and it seems that few involved would recognise what they were seeking even if they found it. Central to Sacred Country is the story of Mary Ward.

We meet her first in 1952, telling off her younger brother Timmy. She is already old enough to be convinced she is a boy. The last we hear of him is in 1980. He is called Martin and is living in America. Now almost everyone in Swaithey seems to be, in one way or another, hung up on sex. There’s plenty of births and general fecundity, but Mary, for instance, wants to deny her breasts. Her mother Estelle wakes up one morning having an orgasm, in which she rejoices. She can hardly remember the last one, and the feeling appears apparently without mechanical assistance. Meanwhile Timmy wants to become a vicar but can’t cope with Latin or Hebrew, shame him, and thus is the perfect partner for Pearl who just wants a child, nothing more. Walter needs dental treatment and, in seeking out the required probing, comes across Gilbert who fixes his mouth and then explores other avenues.

Mary, meanwhile, has left home and has gone to live with a family friend. She thus comes to know a local eccentric who caresses cricket bats and smells of linseed oil. But the point is he allows, even encourages Mary to find his identity as Martin. There is a confusion for Mary, but surely nothing greater than for most, who stumble into and over what life throws at them with copious second thoughts until old age finds them merely lonely. Thus Swaithey’s folk interact, assist and hinder, both harm and care for one another. By the time we have lived with them for 28 years, perhaps we might expect at least some of them to have come closer to realising the realisable. But no, none of us has that privilege. 

A day is a day is a new day. Change is perhaps an illusion, a product of imagination, but certainly there is no going back. We may, as one character does, develop a passion for Country music so strong that we not only wear the clothes but also migrate to Nashville, but we would be no nearer to locating a core of identity within the self that everyone in this book seems to seek. Mary-Martin, meanwhile, moves to London. The separation from his-her family seems permanent until a late suggestion of reconciliation. Shotguns have gone off in the meantime. Wars have been fought. He-she seeks out what she wants while doing bit jobs, and then a longer-term relationship with a poetry magazine offers stability. Cooperation is thin. She-he lies and is rejected. Other see through her reconstructions and withdraw cooperation. Eventually, he-she finds someone who asks fewer questions, but the internalised questions remain. They are no closer to answer than he or she.

As ever with Rose Tremain, the emotional landscape is rich, despite its East Anglian lack of feature. Interactions are many and varied, and families are depicted as organic, almost having their own unstoppable life generated from within their own existence. But in the end there is always a distance between people and themselves. It is as if they are strangers unto themselves, with each step along the path towards self-knowledge both painful and taken blind. Sacred Country is clearly worth reading several times.

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The Yellow Rain by Julio Llamazares

The Yellow Rain by Julio Llamazares is thankfully a short novel that describes life, or rather the end of it, in a Pyrenean village called Ainielle. Andres, the book’s narrator, has lived there all his life in a house he calls Casa Sosas. By the time we meet him, he is reaching the end of his life, as is his village, since it is now almost deserted, abandoned by almost all who used to make a life of sorts there. Its economy has dwindled, its activity ceased. Andres remains there with his memories and shrinking present. 

 Andres relates the salient events in his life story through a series of reflections. These take the form of short monologues that allow neither dialogue nor, even reported, any words or reflections of others. Thus everything is filtered through the narrator’s highly partial, inwardly focused perspective. And through that one learns of suicide, betrayal, rejection, life, death, birth, marriage, estrangement and suffering, and all of these tinged with regret, borne of a feeling of deterioration and abandonment. 

The book’s theme is stated and restated, but it always stays the right side of repetition for repetition’s sake. What emerges is an impressionistic vision of unidirectional change for the worse. Thus the novel does not really have a plot, apart from Andres’s conscious preparation for his own inevitable end. Throughout the tone is desolate, with an occasional lightening as high as despair. 

But having said that, it is not a criticism of the book, since it achieves what is sets out to achieve in describing Ainielle’s and, within it, Andres’s own descent into non-being. Andres goes as far as digging his own grave to ensure an interment alongside his memories, most of which seem to be closely entwined with decay and tragedy. He describes the circumstances that led others to take their own lives, to suffer at the hand of an unforgiving environment. One feels that there were always options, but that the identity people shared in their isolated existence was too strong to reject. 

 The Yellow Rain is not a novel to pick up in search of light relief, but it is an engaging, well written and, in its English version, an especially well translated book. Its point may be quite one dimensional, but this transformation is vividly, sensitively and convincingly portrayed. The book is also succinct, short enough to avoid wallowing in its own slough of despond. Ainielle is now a ghost town, but still one worthy of exploration. 

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Double Vision by Pat Barker

Double Vision by Pat Barker is a novel that defies description. Within its pages there is war, crime, murder, rape, love, hate, sex, artistry, creativity, duplicity, anger, tenderness, inspiration: a dictionary might have enough words to list its subtleties. What it has aplenty is feeling and emotion, an ability to convey its characters' innermost thoughts in an almost tactile manner, as if sculpting them for a hand to explore their surface. 

At times, Pat Barker’s characters surprise even themselves. At the heart of the book is a series of relationships between four individuals – Justine, Ben, Kate and Stephen. The two men used to work together as a team. They have covered wars and conflict throughout the world. 

Stephen was the writer, Ben the photographer, who would always insist on getting that one last shot, the one that the eyeless onlooker would miss, the one whose poetry would convey the true horror, the one whose horror, perhaps, might stir conscience. But one day, an Afghanistan, he pursued his perfectionist brief one shot too far and, over-exposed, another’s eagle eye picked him out. The loss felt by Stephen will never be adequately described, especially by himself. His partner’s death puts him in limbo and he retires to write. Ben’s sculptor wife, Kate, is left both numb and destroyed by her loss, a loss which becomes everything and nothing. 

A commission to create a giant Christ for a prime site in a churchyard is both pressing and unexpectedly therapeutic. She wants him naked. He must be clad. But then an accident damages her arms and she must seek help from a gardener, Peter, who is clearly much more than a pruner of roses. Exactly what Peter might be adds a sense of tangible mystery to parts of the book, but these serve only to highlight the fact that he is perhaps the only one of the characters with a recorded and therefore accessible past. 

Justine is the vicar’s daughter. At nineteen she was ready to go to university, but illness disrupted her plans. Being ditched by a boyfriend did not help. And so academe was deferred by an enforced gap year. She ‘does’ for Stephen’s brother and his wife, specialising in caring for a difficult, demanding child. When Stephen lodges with the family, but in a separate dwelling a hundred yards from the house, he and Justine meet. He is old enough to be her father. So what? Their relationship develops through the book, their frequent sexual encounters both rich and surprising. 

Pat Barker’s ability to tease out emotional reaction, to crystallise it but at the same time to keep it fluid makes the story of Stephen and Justine exciting, exhilarating, contradictory, impossible and accepted in one. Whatever people’s ages, whatever their motives, whatever the consequences, either real or imagined, people still need love, can sense its promise, can invite it, even when they know it could hurt, humiliate, destroy. 

Double Vision is thus a complex story of how a group of friends and acquaintances interact with history, reality, their hopes and fears in a small community in the north-east of England. There is a strong sense of place, a keen eye for detail in a rural landscape that is at least partly hostile. Not that other landscapes are not hostile. Memories of war and its consequences haunt some of the characters. Failed relationships taunt others. Unrealised dreams snag away at the fraying edges of what might have been. Death turns lives upside down, lives that go on to new ecstasies of joy, creativity or even plunder. 

At the end of the book you know these people intimately and intuitively. But your knowledge and understanding of people is like a photograph. It is valid only for the instant in which it was taken. As memory, it solidifies an ever changing reality into an illusion of permanence, like a sculpture captures a moment of movement, a moment that never happened. Life goes on. This is a beautiful book. 

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The Hired Hand by Melvyn Bragg

The Hired Hand by Melvyn Bragg is the story of John Tallentire, his wife, Emily, and their families. The novel is set in Cumbria in the north-west of England, starting in the 1890s and following the characters’ fortunes until the 1920s.

John Tallentire is the hired man. He is a farm labourer who does as he is asked but is rewarded with mere subsistence. He accepts his lot. But then, in an attempt to improve his life, he becomes a coal miner in pits where the workings stretch out under the sea. The First World War comes, and goes, but not without wreaking its own dose of havoc on the family. John lives through attempts at trade union formation. And there is an accident in the coal mine that traps several miners.

And so John’s life unfolds, working its way towards a goal one feels that he never chose. He is a hired man, a seller of labour in a market that, by definition, undervalues what he does. It is his lot to respond to the demands and commands of others. His own preferences, his own motivation must always be kept firmly of secondary importance because, as a hired man, he has no resources to apply to his own ends until he has satisfied the demands of others. And, inevitably, those demands are as great as his willingness to fulfil them. Consequently, the rewards of his labours are never enough to raise his life above satisfying the needs of today.

Emily, his wife, lives a dutiful life alongside him. They marry with their lives ahead of them and Emily makes do, happily, with her lot. The children come – and go, since not all of them survive. Neither do the surviving children seem to have much of a chance of their own to break out of the dependency that is their life. The subtlety of The Hired Man, however, is that this continued dependency is cast in a society that is subject to constant change. It is not tradition, or shackles of rigid social systems that perpetuate poverty. It is the social relationships between different groups that endure, even when social, political and economic structures change.

And it is a life that finally exhausts Emily, leaves her but a ghost of her former self. It has been said that working class life in England was nasty, brutish and short. In the Tallentire’s household, there is much dignity, only occasional nastiness and little of the brute. But brevity is always a threat.

Attempts to form unions, attempts thus at creating some stability and security, are described with great effect. It would perhaps seem self-evident that poor people with little security would embrace those who promised improvement. But Melvyn Bragg’s portrayal of the process is subtle, and identifies how the workers’ very insecurity can be manipulated to convince them to act against their own interests.

There was one aspect of the book that was less than successful. This was the author’s attempt to write dialogue in local dialect. Spellings are changed to suggest different intonation and words are invented to capture local usage. Too often, however, this got in the way of meaning, thus detracting from the bigger picture. How to deal with accented English always presents a writer with a dilemma. Conveying local flavour is the goal, but this cannot be achieved if the readability of the text is affected. It is, however, a minor point.

The Hired Man, overall, is a novel about change. The workers’ role within that change is insecure throughout. It is not change, itself, that brings about the insecurity, which is the way things are often portrayed. At one point, when the characters consider on whose behalf they are fighting a war, they see clearly that they themselves can never benefit. But neither can they conceive of not fighting. They are hired to do as they are told.

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Mission - a review by Timothy Harman

This is a beautifully crafted book, rich in sensuous language evoking a flavour of Africa. The structure of the book is most unusual, with events, past and present, revolving around one particular episode. It is a story that holds you, envelops you, until the very last page. The characterisation is truly masterful. The plot intriguing. This is not a light, something and nothing, beach read, it has a depth and atmosphere that only a truly talented author can create. It is a classic and it is certainly one of my all time favourite books. I shall be most disappointed if this book doesn't win one of the prizes for literature. View the book on amazon Mission