Reading Matters

'The Birds on the Trees' by Nina Bawden

 

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 190 pages; 1972.

Recently the organisers of the Man Booker Prize announced a new one-off award: the Lost Man Booker Prize. This is designed to honour books, published in 1970, which missed out on the opportunity to win the Booker Prize.

Nina Bawden's The Birds on the Trees is one of 22 titles which have has been long-listed (a shortlist will be revealed in March), so what better reason to extract it from the tottering TBR pile for a quick weekend read.

It's probably best described as an English middle-class kitchen-sink drama. The cover of my first edition Penguin paperback (see above) makes it sound like a sordid story about a teenager on drugs -- "This is Toby: withdrawn, difficult, intelligent, and a drug addict. His family are baffled, defeated..." -- but it's really about parental expectations and what happens when your children do not live up to them. 

Intriguingly, the book opens with a prologue that introduces us to Toby as a young child. He has a penchant for wandering away from home and visiting the neighbours, usually turning up at Sunday morning breakfasts with "dark famine eyes", declaring that Mummy has given him nothing to eat. It becomes even more shocking when he appears on the doorstep at 10pm one Christmas Eve and tells them that Mummy and Daddy have gone away for Christmas and left him behind, alone. This serves to plant a seed of doubt in the reader's mind: is Toby a liar or are his parents negligent in their care?

When we get to chapter one, Toby is now 18 years old. He has a younger sister, Lucy, who is 12, and a brother, Greg, who's about 7. His mother, Maggie, is a successful novelist and his father, Charlie, an editor. The family is in turmoil because Toby has been expelled from his rather expensive private school for smoking pot. But his Aunt Phoebe seems to be the only one treating it with any sense of perspective.

"It's a terrible disappointment for you and for them [your parents]. But what's done is done. [...] I hope you will treat this, not as a disaster, but a challenge! When something like this happens, it is often the moment to change direction! Lots of great men have had setbacks, worse than being expelled from school! But they haven't sat down under them, nor retreated into self-pity. Not stagnated, but gone on to climb the heights. Failure was often just what they needed to set them on the path of success. A timely spur! Grasp the nettle, Toby, grasp the nettle."

Sadly, Toby does not use the experience to "change direction", because his parents already have his life mapped out for him: he will cram for his exams at home and then concentrate on the Oxford entrance in the autumn. But Toby, predictably, doesn't want to go to Oxford -- he wants to be "driving a minibus, taking kids to school" -- and ends up running away to London, where he stays with a family friend, 21-year-old Hugh, in a basement flat.

Obviously there's a lot of gnashing of teeth, wringing of hands and parents blaming themselves for what they see as their son's downfall. Even Toby's grandmother gets in on the act, berating her daughter when she says "we must have failed him terribly".

"My dear girl, what are you talking about? The things that boy has had from you! Expensive schools, books, holidays -- everything he could possibly want he's been given. Too much, I sometimes thought, I don't mind telling you now!"

When Toby shows signs of depression he's carted off to a mental hospital for a nice little bit of Electric Shock Treatment. To modern minds this seems over-the-top outrageous given that Toby merely smoked a bit of pot and then "lost his way" a little, but The Birds in the Trees is a product of its time. These days the son would be travelling to Africa or backpacking to Australia on his gap year and all this overwrought drama would be treated as nothing more than a rite of passage. But here, in 1970, the generation gap is so wide as to be unbridgeable, and the dangers of drugs -- pot, LSD, heroin -- are around every corner.

What I liked about this novel, apart from its easy-to-read quality, is the ways in which Bawden explores the drama from every family member's point of view, so what you get is a rich, complicated tapestry of petty jealousies, sibling rivalry, love, loyalty, empathy and fear. She's not afraid to show everyone's faults and foibles, so that even if you think that Maggie and Charlie are too over-protective, too prone to mollycoddle their son, you can at least understand their point of view.

Family life comes in shades of grey, and Bawden paints it faithfully and realistically. Is this enough to win the Lost Man Booker? I'm not sure. While The Birds on the Trees is a wonderful "blast from the past" I think the hysterical nature of parental obsession detailed within it almost comes across as too ludicrous to be true. But it's definitely a book worth reading, because there's plenty to mull over, and the characterisation, story-telling and structure of the novel are superb.

'A Woman of My Age' by Nina Bawden

Fiction – paperback; Virago Modern Classics; 160 pages; 1992.

Until very recently I had Nina Bawden pegged as a children's author. Then, while browsing BookMooch a week or so ago, I accidentally discovered she had a rather extensive back catalogue of adult fiction that I simply did not know about. I promptly acquired a rather battered copy of A Woman of My Age (Virago Modern Classic Number 366) and set about reading it.

First published in 1967, this short novel reminded me very much of Doris Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark  in that it tells the story of one woman's emotional journey -- figuratively and physically -- as she struggles to come to terms with growing older and finding her rightful place in the world.

From the outset it is clear that our narrator is not content:

I find this so difficult. When I look in the mirror -- not to see if the grey roots are beginning to show before the next tinting, but in the same way I used to look at myself when I was seventeen, at what, whom and why -- I remain, as I did then, cloudy, fading, sadly out of focus. I do not know myself, only my situation: I am Elizabeth Jourdelay, married to Richard, the mother of his two sons. I am, I am middle-aged. This is an embarrassment that has come upon me suddenly, taking me by surprise so that I don't really believe it. Looking in the mirror I see the wrinkles, but perhaps tomorrow they will be gone and my skin will be smooth again. Though wrinkles are not important. The important thing is that I am in the middle of my life and I feel as I did when I was adolescent, that I do not know where to go from here.

Now, on holiday in Morocco with Richard, Elizabeth longs for the desert because her life was "crowded, cluttered up". But the journey is far from the calm, peaceful one for which she longs. Alongside the heat, there are other English travellers with whom she must contend: the delightfully eccentric and elderly Mr and Mrs Hobbs, and the slightly vain, thrice-married Flora and her much younger lover, Adam.

While Elizabeth enjoys the Hobbs' company, because they remind her of the parents she never had, she finds Flora irritating. Indeed, Flora had gone to Oxford with Richard, and there are suggestions that they pair may have been lovers in the distant past and that their accidental meeting in Fez may have been pre-arranged. These niggling suspicions eat away at Elizabeth, who finds herself analysing her own marriage with a man she barely knew when she married him, aged 20, some 18 years ago.

Her somewhat melancholy recollections of their life together are seamlessly interspersed with what is happening in the present time, as the couple travel from Fez to the barren uplands beyond the Atlas mountains. The reader soon begins to realise that Elizabeth has made far too many compromises in order that the marriage can work, and now, in a foreign country, the cracks in their relationship can no longer be smoothed over. The tension, some of it tragi-comical, builds and builds until it comes to a devastating head...

A Woman of My Age is definitely a product of its times, when women married young and were expected to stay at home and raise a family. But in Elizabeth Jourdelay, Bawden has created a headstrong and independent character who rails against society's "rules" and constraints. Raised by two spinster aunts, one of whom brought her up "to give too much importance to careers and causes and things of the mind", Elizabeth finds marriage and motherhood constricting.

A highly political creature -- "I was very unsure of myself except in matters of political opinion" -- she longs to become a local councillor but Richard thought it a "dirty game and he could not understand how I could endure it" .

Later, when she raises the subject of getting a job, the response from her mother-in-law is crushing:

She said, first, 'Do you really want one, dear? Richard and I thought you had settled so nicely' -- as if I was some sort of jelly -- and then, 'Well, if you really want to, I suppose it would be nice for you to earn some pin money.'

Unfortunately, it does not pan out as planned.

Perhaps it was stupid of me, but I had expected so much, if in a rather a vague way, that the reality was a bitter shock: I was unqualified, I had no degree, I wasn't even trained as a secretary. It soon became clear that nothing which came up to my expectations was open to me. When I realised this, the walls seemed to close in. I became a gloomily devoted mother.

There's something very sad about Elizabeth reconciling her expectations with keeping her family happy, because it's clear that her husband has not had to do the same thing. Of course, we only hear Elizabeth's side of the story, but as the narrative progresses you begin to understand that Richard is not the saintly school teacher husband he purports to be.

And while Bawden deftly captures all the tensions and betrayals and compromises that married people make, she also does a nice line in setting the mood. Her descriptions of Morocco are particularly vivid.

The terrace of the casbah fell away down the hill, dovetailed into one another like the streets and courts of a medieval city, all enclosed in a wall of the same red earth. At one end there was a little tower where cranes were nesting. Beyond the wall was the palm-grove, a chess-board of different coloured grasses, and beyond the oasis, the flat, ochre colour of the desert. The air quivered, not just far in a heat haze, but close by me on the parapet, in a kind of vibrating brightness that hurt my eyes. 

In fact, setting the book in Morocco is a clever touch, because it allows Elizabeth to compare the subjugation of women in North African societies with her own situation. Indeed, when Flora points out that "their men shut them up at home; even if you visit the house, the women don't appear socially. Just to serve the food" the point seemingly goes over Elizabeth's head, but it did not go over mine.

Having read my first Nina Bawden adult novel I'm keen to read the others -- there's certainly plenty to keep me occupied as you can see by this and this. Next on the rank is The Birds in the Trees or maybe I will try Afternoon of a Good Women, two books I mooched even before I'd come to the end of this one. If they are half as good as A Woman of My Age I am sure to be in for a treat.