By love possessed, or not really?
Anita Brookner
WORLDLY GOODS by Elizabeth North
Methuen, £10.95
Nina and Campbell seem unlikely to go the distance, although their wedding is being intensively planned by both sets of relations. The wedding is in fact the entire subject of Elizabeth North's sometimes uncomfortably acerbic novel, in which Fay Weldon's trace is discernible, not only in the author's unkind comments but in the fragmentary structure, discrete sections of uneven length doing their boldly modern work between the reassuring outer limits of old-fashioned chapters. The jaundiced view, which Mrs Weldon has made so peculiarly her own, can be taken up only by those brave enough to wear the hair- shirt in public. Elizabeth North, while struggling bravely with the formula, re- veals fatal traces of tenderness, although this tenderness is displaced on to the landscape, or rather the contrasting land- scapes of Yorkshire and Sussex, for this is a novel about north and south, as much as it is about the wedding. It is also a novel about the Fifties, dire decade of dubious innocence before the Sixties put paid to any kind of innocence at all. Mrs North is very good at this.
There should be more novels about weddings. For here is the perfect formula: relations, with separate biographies, gathering from all over England, the reg- ulation clash of personalities, much cir- cumstantial detail about clothes and cater- mg, the order of service, the honeymoon, computations of how much it all costs, and, hovering over all, the question of whether the whole gigantic enterprise is fuelled by love or mere convention. As the presents pile up around Nina, an infuriatingly blank girl with no inclinations to speak of, her mother, Julia, does the tireless organising expected in such cases, while her father, Harold, retires to his study to note down the state of the weather in his diary. Up in Yorkshire, Campbell, a terrible bore, lays claim to an intellect he will never possess in his researches into various Civil War battlefields, while his mother, Phyllis, wor- ries about her daughter, Nicola, who might or might not be having a miscarriage, her aunt, Winifred, who might die inconve- niently on the eve of the wedding, and her husband Bernard's younger sister, Helen, who is going through a bad patch, largely on account of her husband, Charlie.
This by no means exhausts the cast. There is Cousin Polly up in Swaledale, various members of the Ramsey, Corne- lius, and McKorkodale families, Camp- bell's sister Nicola's children, and, down south, Nina's brother John, her sister Laura, and Laura's husband and children. All these characters will be intimately involved as the plans proceed: children must be amalgamated as page and bridesmaids, the men must fraternise at the stag night (excellently done), and unwise hints will be dropped at various buffet suppers. It is much to the author's credit that one eventually recognises all the names, although initially the task is diffi- cult, and I was particularly worried by some people called Walker who appeared two thirds of the way through. But all are subject to Mrs North's infallible sense of placement as she orchestrates her main event.
But why is she so rotten to them all? If these people have any fault it is surely because they are completely uninteresting. Nobody does any work, although Camp- bell is an estate agent in the family firm and will clearly make a great deal of money once the property boom gets going. Nina got the sack from her trade paper and does not think she will take up 'journalism' again when she is married. There is a good deal of money all round, new money up north and rather less of the old variety down south, although Uncle Arthur can be relied upon to lend his splendid house for the reception. The bride's veil will be an heirloom (and a disaster). There is also masses of time, time to have tea and a gossip in a Harrogate teashop, time for difficult Helen to rummage endlessly through her husband's clothes in search of evidence of his adultery, time for Nina to take long walks on the beach in her mother's old fur coat and to wonder if it is all worth while. Time to summon Nanny out of retirement, for the vicar to offer sherry, time for seven bridesmaids and at least four hymns at the wedding ceremony, and for a very long speech at the reception by another character who just scrapes under the net.
I take it that Mrs North is making a point here, and that this kind of ceremony belonged to the age of aforementioned innocence but would possibly not take place today, that the formality and the hypocrisy of the event were quaint period survivals which were, to all intents and purposes, superseded by the dynamic and brutal Eighties of which the author is a representative. But she is far too fastidious and traditional a novelist to make these points very successfully. Having set up two unlikeable main characters she then allows herself to be thoroughly unpleasant at their expense. And are they all that reprehensi- ble? They are certainly very stupid, and that, to be fair, seems to be entirely their own fault rather than the author's. Although Nina wonders uninterestedly whether she wouldn't be better off living with Campbell rather than marrying him, she makes no move to suggest this. In- stinct, in this case, serves her wisely. And she does get some marvellous presents.
Creeping out from under this story of young love is another story of middle-aged lust, always a more substantial matter, and here proved to be a more interesting and satisfying one. Poor Helen's suspicions are justified: her husband's pockets have yielded a certain amount of evidence.
Charlie is a scoundrel on whom the author smiles. At the wedding he will cast a seasoned eye over the crowd and let it come to rest on Cousin Polly from Swaledale. Nothing will be said and every- thing understood. We leave Polly waiting for Charlie's car to turn up outside her cottage. Their so much more rewarding story is the only one left untold: it is in fact the happy ending to this piece gringante.
But Elizabeth North has proved in past novels that she can be very subversive.
Perhaps subversion is her game, and the dismantling of convention her entirely reasonable intention. What is needed now is a novelist who can bring convention back from the boundaries to which it has so inordinately strayed.
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