Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week has come round again. The announcement describes it as the third and last one - I do hope it won't be the last, as I've still got lots left to read by this exceptional author (yes of course I could read them anyway, but I do enjoy the community spirit).
Anyway I knew nothing about this novel before I started it. It was actually recommended recently by a fellow STW admirer, and when I bought it I had completely forgotten about the STW Week. So it was sheer serendipity that I had got it at the perfect time.
The story starts in an unspecified time which we quickly realise must be the early Middle Ages, and this is confirmed by a date that finally appears - 1170. Working backwards I'm guessing the incident that opens the book must be in around 1150. It's a dramatic beginning - a young woman is enjoying a perfect night with her lover when her husband bursts in with a group of friends, kills the lover, beats his wife, and accidentally kills also the old woman who was keeping watch for them. Everyone says he should send his wife to a nunnery, but he doesn't want to part with her dowry, so she lives on, bearing more children. Finally she dies in childbirth, and the husband is overtaken with regret and guilt. In expiation, he founds a nunnery in Oby, one of his distant estates. This becomes the corner that held them - them being a succession of nuns who arrive, sicken and die (or get murdered, or run away) over the course of the next two hundred years.
The events of two hundred years would seem like a lot to cover in a single novel, and in fact STW takes the reader through a rather breathless fast forward summary of some major events - fires, floods, hornets, an absconding nun, a bishop convicted of carnality with a cow (both were executed) - before coming to rest in 1349, the year the Black Death came to Oby. From here on, the chapters are dated, each generally covering three-year periods, ending in 1382, some 33 years later. A relatively short period, then, and you might think one in which not a great deal could happen to a community of nuns, but how wrong you would be. There are friendships and rivalries, jockeying for position. One nun goes mad, another absconds with a lover, another is deliberately drowned in the fish pond, another is raped and becomes pregnant. Priceless objects are buried in a safe place by a loyal retainer who then dies without telling anyone how to find them. A spire is built on the church and then destroyed, to be rebuilt later. The convent's finances are frequently under threat, and the local bishop has little time for them.
Is the convent a spiritual place? Few if any of the nuns have entered it by choice. Instead, they have mostly been gifted by their families, having no choice in the matter. Girls as young as twelve arrive as novices and undergo some lessons and training to fit them for the religious life. But it's rare for anyone to have what we would call a real vocation, though there's certainly some piety and of course a great deal of prayer. One nun longs to become an anchoress, to be locked in a tiny room with one window, engaged in endless prayer, but her desire is never fulfilled. And heading the religious life of the convent is the Nun's Priest, Sir Ralph, who is always on hand to hear confessions, take services, and give the last rites. Although he's in many ways a typically lazy, self-indulgent man, he is good-hearted and sensitive, loving nature and music, and one of the few characters who survive through the whole 33 years. However, as the reader knows from the start, Ralph is not a priest at all. Raised in a monastery, and expecting to evolve to the priesthood as his contemporaries were doing, he discovers that owing to his illegitimacy, he can't take holy orders. Arriving one day at the convent hung-over, tired and hungry, he tells the prioress he is a priest to make her feel better, expecting he will only be there for a few days. But one thing leads to another and he stays for the rest of his life, wracked with guilt at deceiving these innocent women, but at the same time often bringing them great comfort.
What, then, is this book really about? STW is too complex and original a writer for there to be an obvious answer. On one level it just looks like a meander through a series of everyday events, with some dramatic interludes. But that seems in many ways to be the point - this tiny microcosm presents a little slice of human life which, though far distant from us in time, represents the way people have always adapted to living together and still do today. Of course it also tells us about the value, or rather lack of it, placed on women's lives at the period: totally at the mercy of their fathers or husbands, they accept their placement in the convent as a natural step, and often welcome it as an alternative to marriage and childbearing. And it interrogates in a gently ironic way the religion still adhered to by many people in the world today.
I'm aware that all this gives little sense of what an exceptionally attractive novel this is. Having finished it I wanted to start all over again - it's crying out for re-reading, perhaps several times. Perhaps when I do I'll be able to do it more justice than I feel I have here. Meanwhile I'm very happy that Helen's STW Week gave me a chance to read and review it.
