Who's left holding the baby?
Anita Brookner
FAITH FOX by Jane Gardam Sinclair-Stevenson, £15.99, pp. 312 The title is misleading, as is the jacket illustration. The determined young woman in the white hat and the large necklace is nothing to do with Faith Fox. Faith Fox is a three-month-old baby, whose mother, Holly, has died in childbirth, and the plot of this excellent novel is driven by the need to find someone to take care of Faith, since her father has always been in love with his sister-in-law, her maternal grandmother is enjoying a last fling with a retired general encountered at a health farm, her uncle is a holy person keeping open house for a variety of unfortunates, and her paternal grandparents, variously disabled but more enterprising than the rest of them, are deprived of the baby until the last beautifully engineered sur- prise. The stylish woman on the jacket is merely one sly joke among many.
In Jane Gardam an uncompromisingly gritty North Country realist (complete with dialect) makes successful inroads into the smoother manners of the south. If it were not for the North Country input parts of this novel, with its accomplished mixing and matching of couples, could have been lifted from the pages of Angela Thirkell. But they can be daft in Yorkshire as well as in Surrey, and Jack Braithwaite's woeful evangelical set-up in a ruined prio- ry, his hospitality towards displaced Tibetans, his gathering in of Tyneside bik- ers, are a match for Pammie Jefford's bridge games and Thomasina Fox's deter- mined flippancy. Nevertheless the pull of the North is so strong that most of the action takes place at the priory, where Faith is left in the care of the Tibetans until one of the bikers strikes out and returns her to civilisation in the form of Toots and Dolly Braithwaite, a blissful pair of down but not out old parties, entirely hospitable, Zimmer frame and unconventional arrangements notwith- standing.
Down south they do things differently, dream of romance up to and including the age of seventy-two. Down south mat- ters are infinitely more hygienic, lawns are manicured, morning tea is brought, fashionable weddings are attended. Odd characters are drafted in and totally mis- understood, so that batty aristocrats have to set the record straight, and have an enjoyable time making mischief in the process. One knows from the outset that an occasion will be found to bring them all I'm sick of you, Charles — I mean it, I'm leaving and I'm going to just throw myself at the next man who comes through that door.'
together. Faith (still not heard from) is to be christened at an ecumenical ceremony presided over by her uncle, at which a backcloth devised by her uncle's artistic wife will be just as ceremoniously unveiled. Stout and not so stout parties converge from all over — the cast is by now consid- erable — while alliances shift and are repaired. The occasion is Christmas and the weather is abominable. As in some pantomime, once the comedy is over, the cast takes a bow. Faith, still in her Tibetan wrappings, and unmissed by all the assembled adults, is restored to rightful ownership in the sidecar of one of the bikes. And all ends happily ever after.
The well made novel, with due attention paid to plot, style, characterisation and pace, is probably as out of date as the well made play, but one may be legitimately homesick for its simplicity, its honesty of purpose. Jane Gardam tells her story with a remarkable lack of animus and an equally remarkable evidence of good faith. She convinces her readers that her situa- tions repay attention, even when they verge on the farcical: after all, some situa- tions are genuinely farcical. The muddles and misattributions that bring her charac- ters together and eventually separate them are dealt with sympathetically. One may not, perhaps, have met any of these char- acters in real life, that is to say outside fic- tion, but then this is almost a fairy story, in which real life is beaten into submission, or rather into shape. Emotions are kept on the right side of tolerable; wits are kept sharp. A mild disdain is reserved for those crossed in love. The old have more sense than the young — not a truth universally acknowledged. And the conclusion brings with it a heartfelt sense of wrong having been righted. It is difficult to think of a contemporary novel with a sunnier disposition. Pure pleasure.
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