20 saturday review Saturday June 11 2022 | the timesRereading The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard
quality of her argument is what matters,
not the eventfulness of her plot. It’s an odd-
ly old-fashioned work — out to skewer the
kind of flippant misandry peddled by An-
drea Dworkin and the radical-feminists of
the early 1980s. Any well-argued defence
of liberalism in the face of fascist blarney is
welcome, though, and it is good to be re-
minded that science fiction exists to give
teeth to ideas.Weaponized by Neal Asher
Tor, 532pp; £20
Ursula and her fellow settlers are trying to
farm. But the planet Threpsis has other
ideas; fighting back “with mobile vines,
poisoned spines, stings that shoot out like
those of a jellyfish and sprays of enzymic
acid”. Not to mention biological flame-
throwers. Ursula and the colonists hail
from the Polity, a post-human combine
that’s benevolent enough but held back by
AIs who take an age over every decision.
Ursula’s people have the impatience of the
original humans: they want to adapt to a
hostile universe without AI interference,
using instead every genetic and
nanotechnological trick in the book to suit
themselves to their adopted home world.
That “Threpsis” is a Greek word mean-
ing nourishment is Neal Asher’s little joke,
as his gleeful but superbly controlled
action-adventure sees the planet’s floraEversion by Alastair
Reynolds
Gollancz, 320pp; £20
Aboard the fifth-rate sloop
Demeter, on an expedi-
tion sailing up the coast of
Norway, Dr Silas Coade wakes from bad
dreams. The Russian braggart Topolsky,
whose polar venture this is, has lied to cap-
tain and crew about the dangers they face
as one icy evening they approach a barely
navigable fissure in some cliffs...
Awaiting our seafarers, should they sur-
vive their passage through this narrow
inlet, are a temperate lagoon and a vast,
mathematically impossible “mirage-buck-
led” edifice. Not only that but the narrative
loops back on itself with telling historical
and geographical variations, whenever
Coade dies (which is often). So he returns
on the steamship Demeter at a future date,
then the Zeppelin Demeter.
Offsetting the tricksiness of the narra-
tive are the friendships Coade strikes up
with the crew. Topolsky’s dynamite expert
Coronel Ramos owes Coade his life after a
ghastly head injury and a successful tre-
phination. Raymond Dupin, a young car-
tographer, ignores Coade’s pleas that he
rest from his mathematical labours; he is,
for reasons Alastair Reynolds dangles outbooks
Man haters
and eco-Nazis
A damaged crew take
on an impossible
voyage and an angry
planet fights back in
Simon Ings’s choices
of our reach for the longest while, hope-
lessly obsessed with the topology involved
in turning a sphere inside out.
All are brought to vivid life, far beyond
their requirements as parts of a puzzle
Christopher Priest (author of The Prestige)
would, I am sure, have given his right arm
to have written. Reynolds’s game of sus-
pense is vertiginous, his playfulness is
never overplayed in this mathematically
ingenious game of smoke and mirrors.The Quickening by Talulah Riley
Hodder & Stoughton, 346pp; £16.99
“They shaped our wars, agriculture, infra-
structure, even our love. And look at them
now: relegated as pets, massively reduced
in number, and put out to pasture.” Dana
Mayer, effectively the sovereign of Brit-
ain’s new regime, may be looking at a
horse, but her besotted companion Arthur
Alden knows she is talking about men.
Everywhere work parties of indentured
males are tearing down the built environ-
ment, replacing patriarchal progress with
what Mayer and her cohort call “growth”.
The world is quieter and gentler now —
because most of the men are dead.
The viciousness and vacuity of this re-
gime is obvious, even to Victoria Bain, a
woman who has more reason then most to
back it. An abused former talent-show
winner, she is Mayer’s minister for culture
and media. Eventually, she, Mayer and
Alden (the executive administrator of the
Westminster Academy for Non-Gendered
People) will strike sparks off each other,
but it’s a long wait.
Talulah Riley has written the rarest of all
literary beasts, a formal dystopia. Theand fauna coming after our self-modified
heroes. Predator hides become reflective
against laser attack. Trees seize humans
with branches turned into weaponised
ovipositors; like parasitic wasps, they re-
fashion their wriggling prey from the in-
side out. Ten-foot-tall stork worms wake
up fiendishly intelligent and determined to
rid their land of alien invaders.
What will it mean for Ursula and the
other marooned settlers if they do truly
adapt to this hideous place? And what will
it mean for the Polity if the creatures that
result ever manage to leave?The Sanctuary by Andrew Hunter
Murray Hutchinson Heinemann, 392pp;
£14.99
Cara finds the job of her dreams working
for uber-billionaire John Pemberley, out to
save humanity from an Edenic island for-
tress so ecologically innovative, so future-
facing that it has been digitally scrubbed
off the map.
Cara, convinced that this is her chance to
save the world, vanishes from her artist fi-
ancé Benjamin’s life. Benjamin does not
take this lying down, and nearly drowns
reaching the island in a small boat. Pember-
ley is impressed by the young man’s bravery
and a spiky deal is struck by which Benja-
min might (but only might) win Cara back.
Ben measures his desire to settle on the
island with Cara against his growing
awareness of the place’s uncanniness.
Many of the women here are pregnant and
no one but Pemberley and his guru (a Mrs
Danvers figure called Angela) looks over- “We don’t tend to do very well with cre-
atives,” Pemberley admits. At least two
writers involved with the project have
died. And at Pemberley’s lodge, the
cocktail conversation returns again and
again to extinction, and whether, given a
depleted ecosystem, the herd might have
to be thinned if it’s to survive.
Literary touchstones include HG Wells’s
The Island of Doctor Moreau and, of
course, Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The
plot is about eco-Nazis, obviously, but the
(considerable) pleasure of this novel is in
the getting from here to there.
Book
of the
monthscience
fiction
happy Louise; thoughtful, anxious Polly;
artistic, stubborn Clary. In the first book,
The Light Years (1990), they are all dumped
together in their grandparents’ rambling
coastal house, Home Place, to see out the
war. Their fathers — brothers Edward,
Hugh and Rupert — are off keeping the
family timber business running or fighting
the Nazis; their mothers are, of course, at
home with the children. To begin with.
So what happens? Well, they grow up
together, squabbling and inseparable, as
butter turns to margarine, curtains fade to
blackout and the postman’s knock be-
comes a daily terror. Rupert goes missing
in France, leaving his spoilt young wife to
bring up their baby alone, and his daughter
lonely and anguished. Louise, meanwhile,
reacts to the lack of affection from her
mother, Villy, by growing chilly herself,
while her philandering father, Edward,
steals dirty weekends with his mistress.
The Cazalet Chronicles should be consid-
ered a feminist classic — not because it’s
stuffed with hammy diatribes against the
patriarchy, but because it shows you,
painstakingly, unflinchingly, what life was
like for women in the first half of the 20th
century. We see the suffocation and the
violence: when teenage Louise goes into
labour, her husband drops her off at a nur-
sing home where she gives birth alone, inthe middle of the night, woozy with sleep-
ing pills in a bed full of blood, convinced
that “the baby must have died inside her”.
Villy, eventually abandoned by Edward,
is a truly tragic figure, surveying her
wasted years and realising: “I shall be
alone for the rest of my life.”
Howard, right, who was born in
London in 1923, into privilege but
not ease, based Villy on her mother,
Kit, a frustrated dancer who “didn’t
love me much”. Giving her a voice in
this saga is, I think, an extraordinary
act of empathy, of forgiveness. She
put little chunks of herself in other
characters too: like Louise, she married
the wrong man too young (the naval cap-
tain Peter Scott, at age 19) to get away from
her mother, then abandoned him and her
baby; like Clary, she fell in love with a
fellow writer (Kingsley Amis), but found
her work stifled by the domestic duties
their marriage foisted on her.
The difficulty of giving love and taking
it, of following heart but also art, comes up
again and again in the lives of the Cazalet
women. Another great family chronicler,
Hilary Mantel, has pointed out that when
Howard died in 2014, media focus on her
“turbulent personal life” (she had three
husbands) overshadowed recognition of
her extraordinary work. Thank goodnessI
n a chilly Sussex bedroom in 1940,
15-year-old Clary Cazalet sits down
“to write about all the things she
noticed people never talked about.
She had made a list. Sex. Going
to the lavatory. Menstruation. Blood
generally. Death. Having babies. Being
sick. Personal shortcomings that didn’t
sound romantic such as sulking, rather
than being hot-tempered.”
This could be a mission statement for
Elizabeth Jane Howard, whose five-book
saga The Cazalet Chronicles charts the
fortunes of an upper-middle-class English
family from the start of the Second World
War to the Fifties. It might at first look a bit
like escapism (it is full of cocoa and gov-
ernesses and beautiful young women), but
it’s not. Like Clary, Howard is here to tell
you the ugly truth.
The story spans three generations, but is
told mostly from the point of view of the
youngest girls, all cousins: the daring, un-This unflinching
20th-century family
saga deserves to be a
feminist classic, says
Susie Goldsbrough
that never happens to women any more.
But make no mistake — Howard is no
man-hater and the Chronicles, written
between 1990 and 2013, are full of gen-
tle, romantic men. For every bit of
harsh reality she dishes out like so
much wartime mutton, she reviv-
es us with sweet mouthfuls of
tenderness: the weary war
widow falling slowly in love with
a Jewish-American war photo-
grapher; the froggy-faced, im-
poverished young aristocrat
wooing a beautiful girl with
his bashful self-deprecation; the
fiercely hopeful daughter rushing,
finally, into the arms of her father and
saying: “Here you are.”
Howard keeps Clary’s promise. She
never shies away from awfulness (“But
Happy New Year all the same!” begins the
first chapter of 1943), never glosses over or
sentimentalises, but shows us life as it is,
whether it’s Polly standing “dumb and
frozen” at her mother’s funeral or Rupert
returning finally from war “with a heart as
cold as ash from a fire deliberately put out”,
willing himself to care about anything. It’s
better for its bluntness. It’s more human
for its flaws. As Mantel said, Howard is
“one of those novelists who shows us what
the novel is for”.For every
harsh reality
she dishes out,
she revives us
with sweet
mouthfuls of
tenderness