Review: Shirley Hazzard, The Bay of Noon

Volcanoes and planes - a somewhat familiar story these days. Both also play their part in The Bay of Noon, the tragic crash of a military plane on Mt Vesuvius providing the opening lines of Hazzard’s novel. Set in post-WWII Naples, The Bay of Noon is perhaps less a story of tragedies (though they play their part), than one of encounters and the interweaving of people’s lives as a result of said encounters.

At the centre of the story lies the friendship between Jenny, a young Englishwoman who arrived in Naples to work as a translator for NATO, and Gioconda, a writer resident in the city. The two first meet when Jenny, armed with an introduction letter from a mutual friend in London, seeks out Gioconda, ‘a woman whose name had become known – and was then becoming forgotten’. Gioconda is a very pretty, intelligent though lonely woman, one eager to make a new friend. Over the course of the following months, the pair’s friendship firms, also involving Gioconda’s lover Gianni. I am intrigued about Gioconda’s relationship with Gianni, wondering why a woman of her calibre would want to be together with a man like him: a smug, self-important and somewhat obstinate character who, though seeing Gioconda, is not only involved with other women, but also has wife and children hidden away elsewhere. And then there is another man, Justin Tulloch, a reserved Scottish marine biologist with whom Jenny first met through work.

While Hazzard does a very good job portraying the individual characters, my particular interest has been in the relationship between characters. Complex and complicated at times, I found them revealing in terms of how people interact, and how hierarchies, real or imagined, determine relationships. Jenny’s relationship with Justin, for instance, initially played out as somewhat of an intellectual companionship, channelled through the two characters working together. Yet right from the start, Jenny did not mind Justin’s ‘casual courtship’, as it allowed her to work in the city. What kept their relationship going, however, was their reciprocal offering of points of reference in a somewhat alien world: ‘we used each other ... as a source of the totally and reliably familiar.’

A common thread throughout the novel, and one uniting Jenny and Gioconda, is how past developments and experiences weigh on the present. Jenny’s story is a coming-of-age story, one shaped by the lack of roots. Having been sent to South Africa by her parents to escape the Blitz, Jenny stayed on after the war to finish school. Removed from her family, her rootlessness was further cemented by her mother’s death, her father remarrying, and her brother’s return to England from Somalia – the latter apparently making Jenny’s return a ‘foregone conclusion’. Where’s the Jenny in Jenny’s life? Though she did not live with her brother Edmund and his wife, she lived nearby, partaking ‘of their own Sunday lamb’, supplying ‘missing links’ between the couple though the life she led back in England was not one she liked particularly. She was prepared to put up with the state of affairs though because she was in love with her brother. It was the possibility of an incestuous relationship that brought her to Naples: ‘It was when this love dawned on me – as it literally did, one grey sunrise, while I stood at my window looking at the brick backs of the houses on the Fulham Road – that Edmund began to wish me away; in becoming aware, I had outlived my usefulness. ... It was then that I resigned ... and applied to be sent to Naples.’ I wonder, was it a showing of strength or the choosing of an easy escape route? Either way, Jenny’s past losses and experiences certainly offer a link to Gioconda, who lost her lover in war and is unable to get over it. Perhaps this explains her relationship with Gianni, someone who is not looking to make the ultimate commitment is also someone one does not have to fully commit to. The sense of displacement is clearly strengthened by the novel’s post-WWII focus.

The novel is framed, then, by Jenny’s coming-of-age, not so much in terms of growing up generally, but in terms of her learning of the ways in which other people interact, friendships develop, betrayal and intimacy. The second frame is provided by the novel’s setting itself, the city of Naples, first, because of its vivid invocation through Hazzard’s descriptions, and secondly because it offers the common locus for the relationships at the heart of the novel.

The Bay of the Noon is well-written and I like the ways in which Hazzard explores the characters and the nature of their relationships – always on the verge of love, but never quite reaching it? It is a story about time passing, friendships of circumstance and what lies beneath them. The exploration of the latter, however, seems a little flat to me sometimes. Perhaps the main reason why, although I generally liked the book, it won’t be my winner. To offer one endorsement of it though: the BBC has a website where people offer reasons for their choice of lost booker winners. This is the snippet for The Bay of Noon: ‘A quiet, rather beautiful and poignant coming-of-age story of a displaced young English woman, Jenny, and at the same time a love letter to Naples, the colourful, fractured, decrepit and dysfunctional city she finds herself in just after the Second World War. It's thoughtful and observant; a lovely read.’

Review: The Birds on the Trees

Toby Flower won't conform: he's grown his hair long, he wears a burnous (the 1970s equivalent of a hoody), he'd rather drive a bus than go up to Oxford, and he's been expelled from school for taking drugs. His parents, Charlie and Maggie, are not only concerned, they are almost hysterical with worry. So anxious are they, that they send him to their psychiatrist friend for 'treatment'. Not wanting to give too much away, for those of you who haven't read it... the bulk of this novel is concerned with dissecting Charlie and Maggie's relationships with Toby and with one another; as well as Toby's relationships with his sister Lucy, his maternal grandmother, and his psychiatrist's daughter Hermia. 

I would say that the novel sort of unfurls, petal by petal, like the 'flower' of the family's name - indeed, Bawden gives us little glimpses into the internal monologues (or, perhaps, diaries) of each family member in little indented sections that break the flow of the third person narration. While this is formally interesting, it's applied so elegantly that it doesn't in any way break the flow of the novel. Instead, reading this book, I had the feeling that I was looking through the lense of a microscope that was in continual motion. I saw lots of different elements of the story in forensic close-up, but I didn't really get a clear sense of it in its entirety. Not until a week or two later, anyway - and if a novel keeps you thinking for that long, surely it's a good sign. I think this is its strength: as a reader I was forced to engage fully with all of the characters and their variant perspectives. Perhaps this can be seen most sharply in the prologue, which inhabit the point of view of the family's neighbours - I'd love to hear what any of you who've read it thought about this part.

Where the novel is strongest, is in its analysis of generational relationships. As in much of Bawden's other work, the influence of WWII is important here (see last post). You get the sense that the war provided a sort of moral structure, which was comforting - it was easy to work out what was 'right' and what was 'wrong'. In the novel's present (1970-ish) this moral compass has been skewed and the characters - particularly Maggie and Charlie - are trying to come to terms with relativism. No one is sure of what the right thing to do is anymore. They all make horrible mistakes and act foolishly. Yet all of these characters have my sympathy - even Maggie and Charlie, whose behaviour towards their son is at times brutish. 

According to a review in The Independent (as quoted on Amazon... OK, I admit it) 'Nina Bawden gets inside the skins of all her people and shows them as paradoxical, crotchety, adulterous, ambitious and completely human... A beautifully sustained impression of the impossibility of family life.'

One of the things that fascinates me about this book, as with Nina Bawden's Walking Naked (which I have also reviewed here) is the way that she plays with the writing process itself. In both books there is a female novelist who uses elements of her family life in her writing. Indeed, according to the article that Tanja linked to in the comments on the last post, there's much in this book that's been influenced by real events in Bawden's own life. Of course this is fiction not autobiography - it would be disrespectful of the writer's privacy to mistake the two, although I think that readers often want to 'own' authors in this way. Yet I do think that Bawden very cleverly draws the reader's attention to the relationship between fact (what is fact?) and fiction (what is fiction?).

Good to see that Bawden herself thinks the novel still stands up after 40 years. You can also read another review of this book - and some interesting discussions in the comments section after - at Reading Matters.

Finally:

• I think my favourite part is the first scene between Toby and Hermia, which is so beautifully observed. What bits did you particularly like?
• Any thoughts on what the novel Hermia was reading might have been? (I suggest The L Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks, but I'd love to be proved wrong by someone who knows better.)
• Could The Birds on the Trees be the Lost Booker winner? What do you think?
  

What do we know about... Nina Bawden?

The first, and most important, thing that I know about Nina Bawden is that she wrote Carrie's War. One of the many, many novels I read as a child which took place during the Second World War and focused on the experience of an evacuee. Indeed this book - along with Michelle Magorian's Goodnight Mr Tom and others - helped to sustain the particularly British idea of WWII as a kind of golden 'we didn't have much, but we were happy' epoch. Though I'm not actually going to admit to this myself, probably there were many comfortable middle-class children of around my age who read these books and thought 'it's not fair, why couldn't I have been born during wartime...' (More about this later.) 

This is not, however, to underestimate Bawden's books for children - in fact they were extraordinary in their complexity. She didn't so much rely on creating false environments in which adventures could occur (adults mysteriously spirited away, etc.). Rather she looked for the adventures, dramas and disasters of everday life. Margaret Clark, who worked for Puffin in the 1950s, likened Bawden's work to that of John Rowe Townsend and Robert Cormier because these writers 'weren't afraid to suggest that children, like adults, could have disappointments or do wicked things.' Margaret Drabble has also said of Bawden that: 

'She has an extraordinary recall of what it's like to be a child - the pretensions of being a child. She remembers the self-pity, the self-dramatisation. Actually it's quite Henry James - the adult reader feels sorry for the child caught up in an adult plot, so the child is seen at two levels.'

Not so very different, perhaps, from some of the more recent 'crossover' (adult/children's) fiction like Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, or Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. If Bawden's books were published now, do you think they would appeal to a 'crossover' audience or be marketed - as the Harry Potter books are - to children & adults separately?

Nina Bawden was evacuated to Wales during the war and this event had an enormous impact upon her life. She read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Somerville College, Oxford and worked as a Magistrate for 10 years. An active member of the Labour party (and an advocate of the Welfare State) for most of her life, she felt deeply let down by New Labour and tore up her party card over the railways. In 2002 she was badly injured and her husband, Austen Kark, was one of seven people killed in the Potters Barn rail disaster. Bawden publicly campaigned for the government and the rail companies to take responsibility for the crash and she appears as a character in David Hare's The Permanent Way (which dramatised the experiences of the victims).

If you'd like to find out more about her, you can read this article from The Guardian. 

Did anyone else read any Nina Bawden books as a child? If so, what did you think of them? I'm tempted to go back and reread them having now read some of her adult novels.