This month I'm looking at two novels, one set in a very ordinary world about "a very ordinary" life, and the other in a fantasy world about far-from-ordinary people. Both Rosalind Murray's The Happy Tree and Naomi Novik's Uprooted weave their own kind of spell...
The Happy Tree, Rosalind Murray (Persephone Books 2014, first
published 1926)
My first reaction
to this novel was disappointment. It seemed like just another of those “golden
summers before the First World War” books in which posh children have happy
childhoods in a lovely big English house only to find sorrow, misery, grief, heart
break etc etc when they grow up. All the ingredients of the idyll are there:
the house, Yearsly, an eighteenth century mansion with tennis court, walled
garden, rose garden, deer park, pavilion, and ponies. It is staffed by butler, cook,
nurse, governess and gardeners, all long-serving and contented with their lot (“the
servants never changed at Yearsly”). It is inhabited by a dreamy woman who seems
to have nothing to do but garden (Delia); her distant but decent husband (John);
and her floppy-haired and, of course, talented and handsome sons (Guy and Hugo).
In the mix too are the public schools (Winchester), Oxford Colleges, teas,
picnics, bathing parties, and dances.
I wouldn’t have
minded any of that – in fact I could have quite enjoyed it – if it hadn’t been
for the way the prose grated on my nerves. It was too falsely simple: things
are “very” this and “very” that. Clauses are linked by “and”, constantly
repeated. Criticisms are couched in terms of “silly” or “rather silly”.
And yet…the book began to get under my skin. I got used to the prose style, and was able to appreciate its intimacy and immediacy: “only tonight I am seeing them for the first time…”, “I think”, “I suppose”, “It is like what I have heard”, “somebody told me”.
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| An army battalion in France, 1915. How many of these men came home? |
From the first
page, there are hints that something else lies beneath the surface gloss. The
narrator, Helen
Woodruffe, grown up, married, with children of her own now, opens her story with
a description of her current home. Here “all the colours are wrong, all the
shapes are ugly”. The contrast with Yearsly becomes all too apparent, possibly
all too unsubtly obvious, as the book unfolds. But that contrast is deceptively
glib. What really struck me was the remark that Helen wouldn’t have minded her
present surroundings so much except “somehow I have come awake tonight, for a
bit”.
In those words lurks a profound
grief, a grief so deep that Helen can only survive by sleep-walking through her
life. They evoke the agony of those brief awakenings, the haste to return to
slumber. And they set the tone for the novel: elegiac, sorrowful, anguished. The
anguish is quiet, just as the narrator insists that the events of her life are
ordinary: “And really, so little has happened to me; my life has been a very
ordinary one”.
That is why in the end I found
the book so moving. The experiences Helen describes – the happy childhood, the unhappy
marriage, the death of someone she loves, the feeling that youth has gone – are
“true of thousands of people”. But that’s what makes is all so terrible. All
that loss, all that sorrow, all that disappointment, the everydayness of
suffering – which Murray describes so well it was almost unbearable to read.
All that is left to her, Helen
thinks, is “to hold out till the end”. Her tragedy is that she is stuck in the
past: she sees change but she can’t accept or make sense of it. “You are a
priceless crowd!” chides Guy’s bride towards the end of the book, “You live in
a world of your own, all long ago, and out of date, and things as they used to
be.”
The book opens the night before Helen’s fortieth birthday; when it closes it is her birthday. Change is happening, whether she recognises it or not. Perhaps, I comforted myself as I finished the novel, there’s a chance for her yet, a chance for all who grieve, to do more than “hold out till the end”. She has already woken up once: it could happen again.
Uprooted, Naomi Novik, (Pan Books, 2015)
Agnieszka, a
woodcutter’s daughter, is brought up in a village on the edge of a wood animated
by a malevolent and powerful entity. Dreadful monsters lurk in the wood, and
from time to time they emerge to destroy people and obliterate villages. All
that protects the realm from being completely overwhelmed is the vigilance of
the wizard known as the Dragon who lives in proud isolation in his watch tower.
His only companion is a maiden from one of the surrounding villages who is
taken to serve him in a manner which is all the more terrifying in prospect
because no one knows exactly what that service involves. In time-honoured
fairy-tale fashion, the women never return to their homes.
When, to
everyone’s surprise, the Dragon chooses Agnieszka as his next servant, it isn’t
immediately clear why. She doesn’t seem particularly talented, beautiful or
clever, and when he tries to teach her the most simple spells, she struggles to
learn anything. But Agnieszka has other strengths: courage, strength and a
strong sense of herself and her roots.
It’s soon clear
that the Wizard isn’t the only one with power, and she’s as much of a shock to
his world view as he is to hers. There’s a Beauty and the Beast air to the
relationship, although the Dragon, in spite of the name the villagers give him,
isn’t a beast, at least not to look at. But he isn’t human either; he’s an
immortal wizard, and he lives up to the beast sobriquet by his habit of taking a
maiden every ten years.
But the novel has
a much broader sweep: there’s more going on than the battle of the Wood vs
Humans. A missing queen, power struggles around the throne, and war with a
neighbouring state provide mystery, suspense, and a great deal of bloodshed.
Witchcraft,
wizards, battles, beasts, a strong heroine, a mysterious hero, court
machinations, and brooding over it all the dark Wood: there’s a lot to take in.
And none of it is told in quite the way you might expect. It isn’t a soppy love
story where the couple start off hating one another but it turns out they were in
love all along, and for me (a reader allergic to soppy love stories) the
relationship between Agnieszka and the Dragon was one of the most interesting elements.
Nor is it a straightforward good (humans) v evil (the Wood). Nothing is quite
so simple: people wake up to the dreadful mistakes they’ve made, and maybe the
Wood isn’t what it seems either. And it’s full of twists and turns and
how-are-they-going-to-get-out-of-that-situations that make it a real page
turner.
I thoroughly enjoyed Uprooted. It’s a fantastic read, and I’ll definitely be looking out for more books by Naomi Novik.
Picture Credits
An army battalion in France: 'A new army battalion on the march in France (near Merville)', 5 August 1915, The Girdwood Collection, British Library on Flickr, No Known Copyright Restrictions.
Panel with dragon, China, Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 17th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain.
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