much’, she wrote in a letter (Julian Barnes,The Guardian, 8 July 2008). I do not know
of another novelist who came into the business via biography.
Her best novels began to appear ten years after The Knox Brothers. The inter-
vening fiction is slighter, deriving from episodes of her own life. (She married an
Irish soldier, had three children, worked for the BBC, ran a bookshop, lived on a
houseboat on the Thames, which sank twice; then wrote.) Each of the later novels
is set in a different country and historical period. The most extraordinary of
these is The Blue Flower,but the one taken to represent them here is The
Beginning of Spring(1988). In Moscow 1913, on the eve of war, Frank Reid is
running a small printing works when his wife decides to leave him. A complete
world is created from small materials, and the narrative successfully misdirects
expectation; a second reading shows the book as different, and even better.
Selwyn, a wandering Tolstoyan idealist, proves to be a serial seducer. Young Lisa,
‘the help’, taken on to assist with the children, is a peasant revolutionary who
takes the post in order to get access to the printing presses. The chief compositor
is also a revolutionary. There are superb sketches of a Russian merchant family,
of the British chaplain and his Cambridge-educated wife. After a visit to the
latter, Frank Reid reflects that ‘All sharp people, no matter whether they were
men or women, were tiring.’ The narrative unfolds with quiet economy, throw-
ing up, as in Russian novels, unpredictable conversational exchanges. After an
occasional aphorism, immersion in the story resumes and the reader responds
with a constantly changing mix of thinking and feeling. As in her life of Burne-
Jones, the power of sexual attraction is shown and felt – but never discussed, a
masterly reticence. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the later books is the
occasional quiet use of the symbolic, in this case a surreal night walk into the
birch for est,which proves to be full of peasants. As it is a Russian novel, there is
also the Spring.
***This selective account of English fiction of the 1980s and after ignores many skilful
practioners of merit. Two of the most distinguished are Anita Brookner (1928– )
and Penelope Lively (1933– ), who write (this is a more than usually unfair and
co ndensed generalization) sensitive novels of a familiar realistic kind, dealing with
middle-class private lives and with personal morality. Penelope Lively, who is
discussed later, at first wrote children’s books, then novels, and has produced more
recently Oleander, Jacaranda, a family memoir, a genre which, like biography, now
appeals to a readership similar to that for novels of social realism.
Beryl Bainbridge
Beryl Bainbridge(1932–2010), well-liked for her series of bitter-sweet humorous
novels, was made a Dame. After some trials in youth, she set to writing stories set in
her native Liverpool. A good early novel is The Dressmakerof 1973, a work of skill
and economy. Set in the blitzed city in 1944, it accurately recreates the social milieu
of the respectable working class of that time, in a household of women: the claustro-
phobic ‘good’ front room, the false teeth, the lupins, the one wash-basin, and the
backchat: ‘Get away!’, ‘Give over!’, ‘You look like the Wreck of the Hesperus’, ‘I’m that
worried’, ‘God forgive you.’ Hard work and avoidance of ‘common’ behaviour gives
way to a desperate pragmatism in the face of disaster. The plot, turning on a girl’s
longing for a visiting GI, and its consequences, is handled with a fine grisliness.
THE EMPIRE OF FICTION 419