![]() ![]() There is something unreal about the bluntness of this reversal, though it’s mitigated by the domestic texture of the prose. It’s as mathematical as a Pinter short, or Ionesco’s The Lesson. ![]() Jenkins knows exactly where her characters are going to end up: Blanche in Imogen’s place, Imogen cast out. The key moment of the book comes for the reader when they realise that there is nothing organic about the plot’s progress: it is entirely teleologically determined. Any deviation from this movement (the possibility of Imogen having an affair, the needs and desires of the Greshams’ horrid son Gavin) gets dragged into the slipstream of the narrative and ruthlessly flung aside. The novel is one of those (like Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday) that is entirely governed by the formal gesture of its narrative: in this case, the gradual and implacable usurpation of the wifely role to rich, shallow barrister Evelyn Gresham by ‘handsome’, practical Blanche Silcox – to which Evelyn’s floaty, feminine wife, Imogen, can only stand by and watch. It was a Christmas present, though quite why my wife chose to give me a book about the breakdown of a marriage, I’m not sure. I started the month finishing Elizabeth Jenkins’ The Tortoise and The Hare, a mid-20th century novel reissued in chichi hardback (there’s becoming something of a glut of them, isn’t there?) by Virago, with an introduction by Hilary Mantel. ![]()
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