It’s all about the journey

This is a quintessentially British novel, full of the most British of characters, with their eccentricities and oddities and charm. The landscape is recognisably and superbly British, the pace and charm understatedly British, the dialogue and characters even more so.  

It begins with 3 strangers meeting under unremarkable circumstances which go on to effect huge changes in their lives. Eve, leaving a lifetime career path, and Sally, leaving a marriage, meet on a non-descript towpath and stop only because they hear a dog howling in a canal boat. The dog, Noah, turns out to belong to Anastasia, owner of Number One, the boat, and one of those instantly recognizably indomitable and intimidating British women, of a type unmistakable – as one character who met her put it,

What a woman that is! Can you imagine having her for a grandmother? Or a mother, even? You’d be well sorted out, wouldn’t you? Properly buffed up by the time you were ten

p145

Anastasia is not only a woman who knows her own mind, exactly, but speaks it without hesitation. She is not unkind, nor unfair, but so down to earth that no hint of sentimentality would dare linger anywhere in her vicinity. She is one of those steel-backboned women who could take on armies, and be back in time for tea. Anastasia however, is very ill, and needing to borrow a house for a few weeks or months while she has tests done, so the women swap – Eve and Sally take Anastasia’s boat to Chester, while Anastasia takes Eve’s flat over. And from this curious start, the novel unfolds. 

It is all about the journey, of course. The events are part of the unfolding landscape as the canal boat drifts along. It is, as might be expected, not a fast journey – the pace is at most a walking pace, sedate and measured. We see the British enjoyment of irony in how Youngson is writing characters who are making escapes, all of them, on this most undashing of conveyances. And not just escapes from anyone or anything, but lifestyle escapes. It is characteristic of the writing which is so deliberately played down and restrained as to almost pass unremarked, until one is suddenly aware of the depth of drama underlying the understatements – of which the British are past masters.   

Youngson typically is able to express succinctly shades and subtleties of internal workings of minds which lend such insight into her characters, rending the tiny details luminescent with interest just by the way she phrases and frames them:

She had travelled from wishing he had never turned up to finding his company soothing, but she wanted him gone so she could coalesce her ideas of who he was without the constant distraction of his actual presence.

p137

Emotions, are of course, always nearly apologised for, although they are no less vivid for all the British embarrassment with emotion:

Sally felt absurdly fond of both of them

p133

There are wonderful passages where the protagonists work themselves out; Sally for instance, coming to a greater understanding of the workings of herself by contrast with the women she comes to know:

She wondered whether Arthur and Eve – who were both in different ways, so sure of themselves – found Ananastasia a challenge to that sure-ness and were perked up by it. Perhaps she was immune because she was so inchoate, so unformed, so lacking n certainties to be challenged, without surfaces for a challenge to bounce off.

p136

Or Eve, seemingly much tougher and more masculine, also comes to certain realizations about her assumptions in life:

She had realized, when she stared work, the burden of having expectations to live up to a position within a masculine society to maintain, that men carried and she didn’t. Expectations of her were so low as to be easy to exceed,. 

And now, when the idea of diversity, the constant challenges to the notion that being a man required and even mandated certain patterns of behaviour, they were, instead of being liberated, cast into a darkness where the rules were not yet clear enough for them to be sure they had read and interpreted them correctly.

p139-140

All the quotes so far have been taken from somewhere mid-way through the novel, in the space of less than 10 pages perhaps – just to demonstrate how even a tiny sliver of the novel provides such an abundance of riches, and how typical it is of Youngson’s writing to pack so much of worth into so little space. Every sentence is deceptively simple and yet its construction is exceptionally and consistently fine; the fierce intelligence underlying and driving the writing, is formidable. Youngson writes as a virtuoso plays his/her instrument. She can do the trills and flourishes too – sometimes, she deliberately delivers passages making comic value of being ‘over the top’ (such as when Sally and Eve first encounter Noah howling in the canal boat:

It howls as if it were a mezzo-soprano in mid-area spotting her husband committing adultery in the stalls while being impaled from behind by a careless spear carrier.

p2

But even as it over-dramatises, it does so with deliberate self-consciousness and self-mockery, and lightness of touch – again, all quintessentially British traits of expression.  

And yet, are they? Youngson’s writing charms precisely because it is the kind of Britishness which seems all but lost today, which one yearns for and so seldom ever encounters now. It harks back to a golden (and perhaps therefore imaginary) era of Britishness, when people kept stiff upper lips and knew their places and put their best feet forward. It is the supposedly ‘best of British’. It is not going to be the kind of writing with universal appeal; it is understated, quietly amused and equally quietly amusing, intensely feminine in consciousness, with something of the beautiful domestic, not so much the domestic of a home, as the domestics of the character’s minds and introspections. 

All that said however, the novel is not perfect; it is not that the loose ends all tying in upon themselves oh-so neatly defies belief – this is perfectly acceptable in a small suspension of disbelief this kind of reader is entitled to expect of a reader. It is more to do with the fact the writing loses steam a little in its last quarter, loses its way as well as its momentum, just a little, and is not as strong a finish to this beautiful piece of writing as one could have hoped. Be that as it may, even if the ending did not quite live up to the sterling quality of the rest of the novel, I strongly recommend this as a charming read indeed, and eagerly await Youngson’s next novel.