This novel, a study of
a 70-year marriage, is about ordinary people but is extraordinary in quality.
Harry Miles, a
sensitive man with a love of poetry, meets Evelyn Hill and falls in love
immediately. He describes her personality
when he first meets her: “She had an
appetite for the better things, quick judgement, a very strong will, a dislike
of doubt or ambiguity, and a way of making her words count. Her opinions and feelings stormed through
her. She warmed to appreciation.” The two marry during the early years of World
War II, and because Harry enlists and is sent to North Africa, their first
years are “islands of cohabitation in an ocean of separation.” After the war, they begin what Harry calls “a
new marriage: real now, an everyday,
actual thing instead of a frenzied week trying to make up for lost time and
then a slew of letters.”
After the war, Harry
has clear hopes for his life. He does
not want to be a “slug of a man, pale and oblivious, bored, existing, yes, but
not much more than that”; instead, “Having survived the war, I hope not to be
ground down by the peace. I want to stay
alert. To love passionately. To go beyond myself. Even, still, to write.” However, Harry loves Evelyn and wants to give
her everything she wants: “He is her
agent. She articulates an aim, he finds
the way.” He takes a job in municipal
construction and works hard so they eventually have a beautiful home with room
for a large garden. They raise three
children who have opportunities denied their parents. They should be happy but that is not the
case, especially as they age and contend with physical infirmities.
Harry observes that “Marriages
were not equal or fair” and it is obvious from the beginning that his marriage
to Evelyn will not be either. Harry
loves Evelyn beyond measure and when not with her tries to write about his
feelings: “But despite or because of the
intensity of his feelings, it was impossible.
He could barely read. It was as
if he had lost all access to language.”
Evelyn, on the other hand, misses “his attention to her comfort and
well-being, the feeling of her own value, a deep acknowledgement of that. On her part, there was no suffering, no
feverishness, no lovesickness.” Harry
wants his wife to be happy and early on decides that he will devote himself to
giving her what she wants. When they
move into a new home with a garden he tells her, “’We’d only known each other
about half an hour . . . but I knew then that you must have your own house with
a garden. . . . I knew I must get it for you.’”
Her response is, “’I just wish the garden would grow faster.’”
There is an
overwhelming feeling of sadness because of how Harry’s love is not returned in
kind and his sacrifices are unappreciated.
He takes a job he does not enjoy because it provides financial security
and enables him to give Evelyn what she wants and his children what they
need. Unfortunately, he loses himself in
the process: “He would never complete a
poem to his satisfaction, much less send one to a little magazine, however much
he had once imagined he might do such a thing. . . . And he was no longer the
young man coming home to his wife after years of war, vowing not to be ground
down by routine, to stay open to the possibility of an ecstatic life.” His is a diminished, disappointed life
devoted to fitting “around someone driven and intransigent.”
Harry believes the
words of a favourite sonnet (Love alters
not with his brief hours and weeks / But bears it out even to the edge of doom)
and the sentiment is true in his case: “He
had loved her all his adult life, long after the gloss of their youth and its
illusions had been worn away and left them with the essentials of who they
were, along with a collection of sometimes contradictory memories … He had
never denied her anything, material or emotional, that he could provide.” Evelyn’s decisions in their waning years
suggests that her feelings have changed; in fact, even during the war years,
when Harry is “low and worn out” and writes
about his “dark thoughts,” she is not understanding: “this Harry was not exactly like the one she
remembered. This man was less practical,
less positive, and less affectionate.”
Their daughters tell Harry that “he was too accommodating with Evelyn”
but “he didn’t see it just as giving in.
It was doing what he could to make things work. He could bend, she could not.” He also fears that if he had stood up to her,
“he would have lost her, and that was unthinkable.” Evelyn, however, interprets his constant accommodations
as a sign of weakness and she dislikes “compromise, weakness, vagueness.”
Evelyn is not easy to
like. She is such a self-centred and
domineering person who is never satisfied.
At the beginning Harry loves Evelyn’s strong-mindedness: “one of the things he loved about Evelyn was
her fierce pride, her willingness to argue even when the facts were against
her, to interrupt, to refuse, to insist-.”
Later, when he is especially frustrated with his job and speaks without
thinking, these traits are turned against him and he realizes “How very
sensitive Evelyn is to . . . any criticism or lack of respect, whether real or
perceived. How, thinking herself
slighted, she will put everything she has into self-defence. How she can be vicious.” As she ages, “She had become more intensely
herself . . . she understood duty and believed in it, yet in practice found it
intolerable … When she wanted something, it drove her. She experienced her own feelings with great
intensity, but often failed to accept those of others, especially if they
differed from hers.”
Despite this negative
portrayal, it is possible to have some sympathy for Evelyn. She enjoyed her work at a law firm but was dismissed
once she married. She is not prepared
for her role as a wife; she has to learn how to cook and thinks of the house as
something she must put “under control,” so much so that she detests Harry’s
collection of books because of “the fussy, old-fashioned effect it gave a room,
especially since his book jackets did not match.” She struggles with motherhood; one of her
daughters says, “’She’s just not a natural carer.’” When she speaks to her doctor about some concerns,
he is rather dismissive. Then there’s a
late pregnancy which she didn’t want.
And there is no doubt that her father’s alcoholism had a long-lasting effect
on her life; certainly, his behaviour and her mother’s reactions help account
for Evelyn’s need to be in control.
This is a novel of
character which is breathtakingly realistic.
I understand why it won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Page’s other novels have also been nominated
for prestigious awards, so I will be checking them out.
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