The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 8 August 2022
by Tessa Hadley
It's easy enough to imagine that, in London's swinging 60s, people living in conventional domestic comfort might be inclined to question their comfort and set out to engage the social revolutions surrounding them. Maybe it is too easy to assume the path of a story set up in this manner. Surely, there are plenty of stories in the subgenre of characters itching to explore broader horizons, straining at the social bindings that keep them grounded in what they have come to see as entirely too limited a life. This book falls into that subgenre and follows the familiar story arc of a middle class wife discovering her inner wild-child through an affair with a much younger man. Phyllis is past 40, with two kids and the comfortable, quiet, if less passionate, relationship with a man comfortable in his career at the Home Office. It is 1967, and when Nicholas Knight arrives, he introduces a seductive note in her life, the lure to a looser more potentially adventurous way of life. But to what extent is Nicholas ready for this involvement, what happens when the passion begins to grow familiar and there's the potential for other life-changing events? The young man, Nicky Knight (could this name be a sly reference to the television channel Nick at Night; could it imply the childishness of cartoons playing at being an adult?), is less an active agent for change than a convenient out for Phyllis. But his entanglements lead to a fatalistic turmoil.
What makes this story rise above the familiar failed marriage tale is the way in which Hadley engages the emotional lives of her characters, Phyllis, her daughter Collette, the young son Hugh, and husband Roger. There are a number of others, too. Friends, family and even the landscape evoke an intense emotional environment. Phyllis runs off to a century-old building doomed to destruction for the coming urban highway (the idyll of hippie squatters to fall to the pressures of time and social change). Suburban houses and villas are cozy and rusted. Even waste land feels immediate and evocative. Sixteen-year-old Collette watches her mother's delinquency and yearns for her own. The men, as a whole, are less courageous. Overall, the intense sensory detail, the emotional depth, make Hadley's novel of domestic unrest an engaging and engrossing visit to its time and its place.
Also by Tessa Hadley: [The Past]