The wobbling of a farouche blancmange
Harriet Waugh
THE CLOTHES IN THE WARDROBE by Alice Thomas Ellis Duckworth, £9.95 Alice Thomas Ellis is quintessentially a modern English novelist of the quirky tradition. Her novels are very short and each line tells. Her surreal tone, and bitter-sweet humour can best be compared to early Muriel Spark, although her voice is her own. In the last few years, however, the weight of a novel has come to be viewed as being of some importance by those who judge such things. Wit, quirky or domestic, being a good deal more difficult to sustain than seriousness, nearly always loses out against sprawling novels encompassing the entire social order or decades of third-world history. Not that some of these are not excellent in their way, but I have yet to read a Tolstoy amongst them. While at her best, as in The 27th Kingdom, Alice Thomas Ellis has written such perfectly judged novels that they must be considered timeless classics. Even at her least good she is rivetingly entertaining as in her Spectator column. I would judge The Clothes in the Wardrobe to be in this latter category.
The novel concerns a girl of 19 whose recent experiences in Egypt appear to have burnt her up, leaving an over-malleable husk to be disposed of. Because of her emotional condition Margaret, the heroine, seems to be unfashionably wet. When the story opens she has allowed her suburban mother to drive her into an engagement with a middle-aged bachelor who has an unattractive interest in pubes- cent girls. Margaret deeply dislikes him, but her dislike of herself is so great that she does not think it matters what happens to her. Gradually it emerges that this feeling of worthlessness has come about because of something terrible that happened to her when staying with a friend of her mother's in Egypt, the revealing of which is the climax of the story. This happening might have been less dreadful, although no less dramatic, if it had involved you or me, but Margaret's despair is double-layered. It is not just that she has participated in some- thing dreadful but that it has closed off her special relationship with God. Her real crime is that, knowing she was particularly blessed, she has turned her back on God's gift. So, since she is already in outer darkness, she might as well marry Syl. All this is revealed gradually. Margaret is like a farouche blancmange. She hangs around her mother's Croydon home wobbling a bit as her wedding draws near but with no will to rebel. Then Lili, another old school friend of her mother's, comes to stay. She jollies things up no end. A female roue, she is an exotic and glamorous addition to the Croydon household and an unlikely guardian angel for Margaret. But from the moment of her arrival Margaret recognises that the cavalry might have come, although this does not make her any less feeble.
Lili is a less destructive version of the heroine of Alice Thomas Ellis's last novel, Unexplained Laughter. Where that heroine was given to misogynistic aphorisms, Lili has a life-affirming, gin-based wisdom, but both of them speak in the recognisable tones familiar to admirers of The Specta- tor's `Home Life' column. And that, I suppose, is my main quarrel with this highly enjoyable book. I cannot but sus- pect that Miss Alice Thomas Ellis's journa- listic persona is beginning to infiltrate her fiction. I can see the temptation of allowing it to do so because it is such a splendid persona, but her journalism is at best a poor shadow of what she already achieved in her novels, and it would be sad if the creative energy that is loosed each week in The Spectator was to impoverish the in- spiration needed to sustain her real work.
The Clothes in the Wardrobe has all the right ingredients for enchantment but something has gone very slightly amiss in the distillation. Margaret, whose five senses articulate the story, is not a very interesting central character. It hardly seems to matter if she is saved from the ghastly fate of marrying Syl. Instead, the pleasure and energy of the novel reside in the peripheral characters, the ghastly mother, Lili and Lili's artist husband and Syl and Syl's malevolent mother with whom he lives. It is these relationships that leave you wondering. Why should Lili and her husband like Margaret's tritely sub- urban and sour mother enough to stay with her in Croydon? Surely Lili must have other, more genial friends around Lon- don? Why should she know the equally suburban Syl from old times? Perhaps the dislocation of these relationships is inten- tional as, after all, we are viewing them through Margaret's impoverished percep- tions, but it could be that the novel is slightly undernourished. All these critic- isms are mere carping, as Alice Thomas Ellis never fails to give pleasure, but because of the deep admiration I feel for her earlier novels I rather wish she would give up writing for The Spectator.
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