The Flight of the Maidens
Jane Gardam Chatto & Windus, 278pp, £15.99
ISBN 070116963X
The action of Jane Gardam's new novel takes place in the summer of 1946. This is a period piece. The cities are flattened, people smoke Woodbines and the news is just getting out about Belsen. Three scholarship girls - two Yorkshire-born, Hetty and Una, and a Jewish refugee called Lieselotte Klein - are waiting to take up their places at respectable universities: London and Cambridge. But they have some growing up to do in the meantime. There is no plot as such, and the glittering prizes are all won, so that the tension in the book is generated by a feminist issue: will they take up their places at college or will they choose to be wives, get pregnant, live their mothers' lives?
The chapters, divided up between the three girls, each end on a gentle cliffhanger, as we shift from one point of view to another. This is always a dangerous moment in fiction, as the reader can easily lose interest, but Gardam is too cunning and too careful to let this happen.
Our central character is Hetty Fallowes, trying to break away from her possessive, predatory mother. Can she do it by having sex or by reading books? Hetty does a bunk to the Lake District and spends a month reading English literature and fraternising with the local nobs and farmers. Hetty's best friend, Una, opts for sex with an interesting communist guard on the railways, who was born on the wrong side of the tracks and talks Yorkshire rather than posh.
The dearly beloved kith and kin provide the fictional obstacles. Hetty's mother is an intolerable, interfering monster, a pillar of sweet, selfish righteousness, who is always magnanimously forgiving slights and insults. Her husband can escape her only by cultivating mad eccentricities. Will Hetty shake off her mother?
It is hard to say what this book is actually about because of the nature of the genre, which is gentle, satirical English social comedy. Class rears its noisome head, only to sink back pacified when the communist strikes up a friendship with the toffs and his working-class mum turns out to be the coal-delivery woman, who nevertheless dresses smartly and keeps an immaculate house.
Gardam's well-observed, crisp prose is a pleasure to read. Her cast of characters - no doubt to be politely called unforgettable - is full of harmless lunatics, streetwise old biddies, war-torn casualties and antique bitches, such as are found in every English town. Gardam's images are sharp, but there is no nastiness behind them. Even the Holocaust is added only to prove that the world isn't really that nice. And the fat, myopic Lieselotte finds a suitable twitchy Polish Jew (he, too, has suffered), loses stones (you can have great sex only if you are thin), gets herself a pair of high heels and comes up trumps, thanks to a wealthy German fairy godfather whom she meets by chance, and who feels the need to make some reparations. Everyone turns out to be nicer than you thought they were; and only perverse and vicious readers, such as this one, find people like Mrs Fallowes unforgivably loathsome.
Gardam places herself in a tradition of satirical English prose writing, which can be traced back through E M Forster to Jane Austen, and she mentions both writers with a healthy dose of comic irony. But Austen and Forster knew that class struggle is about savagery over the teacups, that men deliberately kill off women, and that social hierarchies are maintained by brutality and force. What's more, they say so. Reading Gardam, I longed for something nastier, stronger, more searchingly analytical, informed by a deeper and more passionate commitment to ideas - in short, for fiction that is less safe and less comfortable.
If I were marketing this book, I would describe it as charming, amusing, touching and astute, because it is, indeed, all these things. It is a slice of English life gone by, recorded rather than analysed. Take it to bed with you: there is nothing here that will disturb you.
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