Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill

Author:Susan Hill [Hill, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Profile Books UK
Published: 2010-08-05T21:00:00+00:00

Forgotten

JOHN BRAINE. ALAN SILLITOE. David Storey … names from the fifties. Storey is remembered as a fine playwright, but does anybody now read his novels, so influential to those of us growing up among books and writers of that decade and the one following? This Sporting Life and Radcliffe sit alongside John Braine’s Room at the Top and Sillitoe’s iconic The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner in old orange Penguin editions, their titles reminding me of the rise of the working-class novelist which changed the ways of publishing for ever. I re-read the Sillitoe a year or so ago and it stands up to the test of time pugnaciously, but sitting alongside it I have found another novel. I thought it a minor masterpiece when I first read it but that was thirty years ago. I have decided that reading from home must include books of which I once had a high opinion of some kind – that is, I once thought them very funny, wonderfully well written, original, or just very enjoyable. I have kept a number which seem to have earned their place, though time changes the books one loves.

Will I still rate John Wain’s The Smaller Sky highly? I have put it on my bedside table. I am going to read it over the next few nights. Will I want to keep it on the shelf of assorted paperbacks next to the pinball machine?

Yes, is the answer to that, a week later. Yes, with some minor reservations. The Smaller Sky is not a perfect novel – but then, how many are? It seems dated, which is fine, but, in a way, not quite dated enough and that is true of a lot of novels of the 1950s and 1960s. I had forgotten how very moving it is. It is a poet’s novel, not because it is written in lyrical language, certainly not because it is over-written which is what ‘poetic’ often means when applied to prose. But John Wain was a poet of some distinction, and that is evident in the way he shapes The Smaller Sky, in its beautifully balanced structure and its imagery, and the wonderfully evocative descriptions.

It seems at first to be a quiet and rather low-key book, yet it is really a passionate plea for individual freedom and a howl of rage at the conventions, restrictions and insensitivities of some human institutions. John Wain was not one of the Angry Young Men for nothing.

The hero, Arthur Geary, is a middle-aged commuter, conscientious and weary, dutifully supporting his wife and family, successful enough and apparently contented. And then he begins to hear drums beating frenziedly inside his head. His response is to run away, to escape into a life of perfect order and calm lived entirely on Paddington station, for here alone the drums in his head are silenced. Geary is law-abiding, he has saved money which he sends regularly to his family. He now wants to save his sanity. But shouldn’t someone ‘rescue’ him? Surely he cannot go on as he is.

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