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.’