I re-read Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles quite recently and loved them just as much as I had the first time, though I don't seem to have reviewed them on here. I also read one called Odd Girl Out back in 2012 which I seem to have enjoyed a great deal. But though I'd tried one or two of her other novels, nothing else had measured up - until now. For some reason I'd never come across The Long View, though I've since read that it's regarded by some as her best novel. I'm not in a position to judge that, but I can tell you that it's a really really good book.
This is the story of a marriage, but one that is told backwards. In the first section, set in the late 1940s, Antonia Fleming is preparing for a dinner party to celebrate her son's engagement. She knows the marriage will be a disaster, but is powerless to do anything about it. Her daughter, too, is in a mess - pregnant by a man she has no intention of marrying. Nevertheless the party must go on, despite the fact that she has no idea whether her husband Conrad will actually put in an appearance. For these two, though nominally still a couple, are seriously estranged. It's a deeply unhappy situation, and the rest of the novel moves back in time, showing the various stages of the deterioration until we finally reach the moment when Antonia - Tonie - first encounters the man she will marry.
This is a structure that for me worked brilliantly. Antonia as we first meet her seems a fairly typical somewhat depressed middle-aged woman, one whose fight has gone out of her. There's nothing she can say to her husband or her children to change or improve the situation, and nothing she can look forward to in the future. But in showing the stages through which this state of affairs came to pass, Howard has a great deal to say about women's roles at the period, and about men's view of what these should be. The second section shows a point at which the marriage is severely tested: Conrad, who has had passing affairs throughout most of the union, has fallen deeply in love with a much younger girl, and Tonie, on a holiday in the South of France, has got herself into a passionate affair with a man who is almost a stranger. Much to be said about double standards here: Conrad is a complete bully and his scornful dismissal of his wife's affair just shows how uncaring he is. The second section shows the couple on honeymoon in Paris. Conrad is obsessively in love with his young wife's beauty, Tonie seems uncertain, shy and somewhat unwilling to commit to her husband's passion. Finally in the last section we meet Tonie aged seventeen, bullied and put upon by her domineering mother, who publicly criticises her looks and her behaviour whenever friends are visiting. She falls for a man who proves to be a cad, suffers deeply, finally meets Conrad in the final sentences of the novel.
This slow revelation of what has made Antonia the way she is at the start of the novel has a powerful effect. A girl of exceptional beauty, thoughtful and intelligent, has basically been deprived of her sense of self-worth, first by her mother's deliberate cruelty and second by the careless, bullying treatment of her husband, who makes no secret of the fact that he has fallen out of love with her. Perhaps with a more loving and nurturing childhood she would have had the strength to stand up to Conrad, possibly even to leave him. But the only point at which she seems able to act for herself, when she becomes briefly involved with a lover, ends badly.
Howard is a brilliant writer. Yes, her focus is limited to a level of society that may seem privileged or elitist, but that is not important. What matters is her superbly perceptive depiction of human beings, their faults, foibles and self-deceptions, their loves and their disappointments. If you've never read this, please do - you won't regret it.
