March 1961
Miss English is perhaps predominantly a writers’ writer, although this does not mean that she is not also a readers’ writer. But apart from the sine qua non of any good novelist - readability - she has a remarkably articulate sense of form, and writes with the mixture of concern and passionate attention to her detail together with those delicious little flights of what I can only call pure writing fancy which are seldom found in the greater bulk of readers’ writers. The four voices are none of them - as the readers’ writers would say - pinned down to professional or external life. They are more like those various, interesting objects found upon beaches after a shipwreck; clearly they have all had some use but one is not quite sure what it was: one picks them up and examines them with curiosity and faint nostalgia for the unknown heyday of their utility. There is Mona, a gigantic old drunk, who has been married and had one daughter who died, and now lives on a pittance with an aunt in Belgravia. Her one time husband, Penry, was once some kind of journalist, who has brought vagrancy and total irresponsibility for any of his wives or children to an art so fine that they all feel constantly in his debt. There is Elizabeth, an earlier wife of Penry’s, a Catholic convert with a son called Gervase, whose silliness and dishonesty become pathetic when she had to face losing him to the fourth voice Blanche, a young woman who has left a rich husband and small daughter to embark on marriage with a bloodless young man.
Blanche is intelligent, vaguely literary, and with an emotional structure which is only spasmodically equal to her perceptions. Of these voices, who speak in random turn (Gervase neither deserves nor gets one), it is Mona who really wrings one’s heart - with her irrelevant clarities, her reckless vulgarity, her knowledge of the appearances which she is damned if she will keep up, and her understanding of the mutual dependence forged between herself and Penry by the indissoluble links of their different weaknesses. She reminded me in some ways of Joyce Carey’s Gully Jimpson in The Horse’s Mouth. Given that something which is both elegant and intricate can also have power, I think this is a powerful novel, and Miss English a very good writer indeed.