The present and the passed on
D. J. Taylor
PAINTED LIVES by Max Egremont
Hamish Hamilton, £11.95, pp. 192
Amid all the critical squawking noises about bratpacks and magic realism, it tends to be forgotten that the books people prefer to read and buy are set, by and large, in country houses and rural rector- ies; that they are novels not about new barbarism and newer vices but old money and old and generally unrequited love. The well-kept secrets of the past; the lush, fading aristocratic vista; the dogs lolling before the open fire: such novels are easily mocked, not simply for their haute stylisa- tion, but for their refusal to acknowledge that the nastier aspects of the modern world even exist. Painted Lives has all these characteristics — the country house, tenuously maintained, the rattling skeletons — but it is a sharply idiosyncratic work, the standard lament for lost, upper- class time; yet with a hard, scything edge.
This is Max Egremont's third novel. It is fair to say that its predecessors, The Ladies' Man and Dear Shadows, fell upon stony ground. They were sparsely re- viewed, no publishing house thought them worth putting into paperback and they have since been remaindered. Both — The Ladies' Man in particular — are woefully underrated books, formally presented, ab- out such fictional standbys as politics and publishing, but with an odd, bizarre under- tow. Dear Shadows, for instance, its hero the paranoid director of an old family publishing house, is a comic novel which is not quite a comedy, a piece of realism which soon tugs away from its original moorings. It is the ambiguity, deliberate and cunningly worked upon, which gives the second novel its distinctive, unsettling quality. Painted Lives preserves the characteris- tic atmosphere of Egremont's novels — the elegiac cadence, the sense of bygone de- cencies fallen into desuetude — while extending the sombre tone. Like Dear Shadows it turns on the juxtaposition of old and new, on what is slipping away and what is taking its place. Unlike its prede- cessor it introduces a new theme: the ability of the dead to dominate the living. George Loftus, a young art expert, is summoned to the venerable South York- shire pile of Cragham to cast an eye over the Layburn family paintings. Here, vague- ly superintended by the house's elderly owner and his crony, an ancient denizen of the art world named Bligh, he quickly falls under the spell of the dead wife whose portrait he is to restore and whose diaries turn up by chance in the room set aside for his work.
The pile of yellowing exercise books, as one might expect, discloses a fine old catalogue of indifference, cruelty and in- fidelity, casting an eerie light over the Layburns' marriage and chipping the veneer away from Bligh's cautious confi- dences. Yet their importance lies not so much in the depiction of a failed marriage and its consolations as in the effect on their reader. Loftus has arrived at Cragham determined not to be impressed. 'He must not be fooled by this place, for what is the reality? A round, red-faced man talking of days that are gone . .'. But, despite the sneer of Layburn's army son (`Different perhaps to your own little life'), he is entranced, even to the extent of trying to insert himself into this pattern of family life. There are two revealing scenes to- wards the end, one in which he invents a relationship with the Layburns' former neighbours as a means of extracting further confidences and is nearly found out, another in which he tracks down the wife's former lover. What happens? Outwardly nothing, no- thing at all. The pictures go to London for restoration and are returned. The diaries moulder on the study shelf. Egremont provides a bitter little coda, recording Layburn's death, the conversion of the house into a 'pleasure park', Loftus's ordinary relationship with an ordinary girl he meets at work, and finally some ambi- guous words about his 'hopes', now relin- quished as they were 'founded on an unreal view of the world'. Despite the narrowness of the perspective, it is brilliantly done. Though there is the occasional grinding of narrative gears — the characters whose willingness to talk about themselves is a shade too contrived, the super-revelatory diaries — Painted Lives succeeds as a result of the author's meticulous eye for detail and his ability to project himself imagina- tively into other people's minds: the Layburns' arid 1940s courtship, described from the point of view of the wife, or Bligh playing his likenesses game with characters from Proust. It is faintly reminiscent, perhaps, of the work of Piers Paul Read, minus the Catholicism and the overween- ing sense of class: sparely written, unobtru- sively constructed, but with an oddly voluptuous quality about the prose. Moreover, despite its evocation of country houses, dead hopes and faded lives, it is a novel about the present rather than the past.
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