Sidetracked on My Way to the Butcher

Have you ever started out somewhere and ended up somewhere else, accidentally on purpose as they say?

The last time I was at the Reuse Centre it was to pick up a lonely copy of Brightness by Elizabeth Jenkins.  It really is a deplorable wasteland of garage sale cast-offs with seventies soft rock playing in the background but one man's junk is another man's treasure.

There are stacks and stacks of contemporary fiction but in another area is the tiniest hallway, little more than shoulder to shoulder.  Two books stood out and despite leaving them behind on my last visit they've been haunting me so I decided to end it and bring them home.  I really enjoyed my last Dickens read of The Winds of Heaven recently reissued by Persephone so it was worth taking a chance and this copy of Flowers on the Grass is extra special as it's a first edition.

 "Embracing all levels of society, this is the trouble-laden saga of Daniel Brett, psychologically displaced after the war, unwilling to face any responsibility, and bringing wreck and ravage in his train. With the death of his wife, who was gentling him into home life, he finds refuse in a boarding house where his drunkenness hurts a maid, another lodging where the landlady wakes up to the fact that he is not reliable, on to a tutorship which does not help his epileptic pupil, a job as a teacher where he is almost the cause of, but turns out to be the savior, of a devoted young girl student in the school. It is the hospital, and a neighboring patient who brings him back to a small sense of obligation that makes him bestow undreamed of happiness on a young couple. Stop-watch episodes, this offers a panorama of post-war England and many of its problems...readable if erratic." (Kirkus Reviews)

 My American by Stella Gibbons is about to be reissued by Vintage.  Despite not being able to find a synopsis anywhere the opening paragraph was inviting enough for me.
 
"It was autumn, Kenwood House, the eighteenth-century mansion on the edge of Hampstead Heath, had been recently opened to the public by King George the Fifth and its beauties were still sufficiently unfamiliar to attract crowds of Londoners, as well as foreign visitors, to stare at them and admire the collection of pictures inside the building."
 
During my last trip to London in 2009, I was one of those foreigners visiting Kenwood House.  I had walked from the Hampstead tube stop in new shoes and was never so glad to see a bench...I digress.  Since there were no reviews to be found on either of these novels I was wondering if anyone has read either of them and can tell me if they enjoyed them or not.

The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins

It would take a stellar read to hold my attention with The Heiress back from school and being the lone dog walker and play toy of Deacon with R away.  The Tortoise and the Hare was definitely that and so much more, and to think it was a serendipitous purchase due to a riveting pair of red stockings on the cover.

Considering that I must be one of the last in this sphere of bloggers to read this quiet masterpiece I won't go into much detail about the synopsis.  In the simplest of descriptions this book is about a woman slowly coming to the realization that her husband is having an affair.

Imogen Gresham is younger than her husband, Evelyn, a handsome and confident barrister with an office in London.  Her day usually consists of seeing to the whims of her son, Gavin, who holds the same regard for her as his father.  She is nothing more than an ornament, someone who runs their errands or sees that their clothing is bought from the right shops.  I haven't quite decided if it's down to Jenkins' writing or my finally coming to terms with the character of the quiet woman but Imogen failed to frustrate me.  Yes, I wanted her to call Evelyn on his neglectful behaviour and excuses to spend time with Blanche the Bloated but I was willing to wait patiently for the eventual outburst.  Well, at least I hoped there would be something of the sort.

Disliking Blanche, Evelyn and even Gavin made it easy for me to put them on a team early on and separate them from Imogen.  I sat on the sidelines as quietly as Imogen, waiting for her to come to the conclusion that she deserved happiness from life for her own sake.  When that moment came it would have been easy to write a scene of a woman emerging as a butterfly in technicolour but I thought Jenkins stayed true to Imogen's character and the ending was a most satisfactory one.

The handful of peripheral characters were a wonderful respite, the Leeper family with their house in disarray added an element of fairy tale from which little Tim escapes his bohemian family.  And wasn't Cecil Stoner wonderful with her subtle yet potent jibes to Blanche?  Oh, just writing about it makes me want to turn right back to the first page and start all over again.

Thank you to everyone who told me I would love this book, you were right!  In fact, I enjoyed Jenkins' writing so much that I'm off to the dusty Reuse centre to pick up a copy of, Brightness, that I left behind last time.