Early this month, while on the journey to deliver Daughter Gray to summer music camp, I found a couple of British paperback novels. One was on the rack at the Amherst Salvation Army Thrift Store, the other on the dollar shelf at a used book shop in South Hadley. Neither is on the menu of my usual reading fare, but with several more long trips looming I picked them up to taste. They're:

• Wise Virgin by A. N. Wilson (1982) — a tale centered on Giles Fox: medieval scholar, bitter over the hand dealt him, infinitely foolish in his certainty and selfishness. Giles is now blind, almost 50, and twice a widower. Around him orbit his 17-year-old daughter Tibba and his research assistant, Miss Louise Agar, who serves as his eyes in his work on an obscure religious manuscript from which Giles hopes to rescue his career. Both Tibba and Louise love Giles. There are further perturbations from more distant planets in Giles's solar system, relatives and acquaintances of the central characters. Conflict ensues ...
• The Girls by John Bowen (1986) — at first an apparently lighthearted story of English village life in the 1970's, focused on Janet and Susan. One is almost middle-aged, the other is a decade younger. They're lovers who run a gift shop and play at country life in a genteel hobbyist way. But events turn darker when, through various accidents and mistakes, their lives become complicated via a baby, a murder, a cover-up, and then either insanity or supernatural phenomena ...

Both Wise Virgin and The Girls are rich in imagery and both are quite well-written. Wilson knows his stuff re medievalism, and his depictions of the infinitesimal teapot tempests of academia are charming, reminiscent of Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis's first novel). Bowen, in turn, has a Tolkienesque vocabulary of garden and hedge, as well as a wry sense of situation.

Both books are raunchy in places, though not grotesquely so. Both rely on hugely improbable coincidence at key plot moments. Both also have singularly unsatisfying endings — as though their authors were too "modern" to permit themselves a full, happy resolution of tension among their creations, and instead had to leave their readers wincing and head-scratching.

Maybe that's sophistication nowadays; I prefer to see things end on a more comfortable note. So although I enjoyed both novels and recommend them, I'm working on my own "director's cut" alternative conclusions for these stories, in the same way that Paulette [1] does for many modern movies that fail in their final scenes ...

TopicLiterature - TopicPersonalHistory - 2003-07-20

(correlates: YouCanHaveItAll, SelfConfidence, BetterFasterCheaper, ...)