The Handyman by Penelope Mortimer

Joan Kahn/St. Martin's Press, 1983)

 

I've read and enjoyed many books by Penelope Mortimer (The Pumpkin Eater, My Friends Say It's Bulletproof, The Home, A Villa in Summer,  Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, Saturday Lunch at the Browning's), and I think I liked this one least of all.  In fact, I found The Handyman to be a almost thoroughly unpleasant book.

It's the story of an older woman learning how to live on her own without children or a  husband -- a situation that is also explored, with far more subtlety and acumen, in Mortimer's book The Home. 

Phyllis Muspratt's husband drops dead one morning at the breakfast table, and she is forced to maintain her genteel and comfortable life with little help from her son and daughter (she appears to have no friends).  She sells the family house in Surrey and moves to a somewhat dilapidated country cottage in the drab and ornery village of Cryck, which is ruled over by a despotic landowner called The Brigadier and whose citizens are terrorized by The Brigadier's "boys," an unsavory pack of young men who ride around on motorcycles damaging personal property. 

Also living in Cryck is Rebecca Bourne, an Iris Murdoch-ish author, who has lost the inspiration to write and who maniacally gardens, smokes cigarettes, scowls, and is thoroughly unpleasant to everyone she comes in contact with.  Phyllis tries to befriend Rebecca with no luck at all, but does endear herself to Rebecca's damaged daughter, who has just been released from the bin (her word) after a suicide attempt. 

Phyllis's two children are both preoccupied with their own lives.  Her (gay) son Michael is an editor at the London publishing house  that -- surprise! -- once published Rebecca Broune, and her daughter, Sophie, is a wife and mother who doesn't really seem to like her mother or care very much about her, perhaps because she has her own problems -- her husband Bron is a serial philanderer.

When life in Cryck becomes unbearable -- the titular handyman of the title, who is renovating Phyllis's cottage, turns out to be a total sexual creep and tries to molest her -- Phyllis decides to sell the cottage and move to a retirement home, where she can live safely and happily with other genteel, tea-drinking people and enjoy her old age in peace and quiet.  She arranges all this behind her children's back and days before she is due to make the move, while feeling the happiest she has ever felt in her entire life, she falls down the attic stairs, hits her head on the door, and instantly dies.  (It takes four days for her body to be found.)

Putting a nice, if boring, character like Phyllis through such dreary ordeals only to have her die accidentally at the end of the book seems rather cruel and perverse to me -- to both the character and the reader.  Perhaps Mortimer feels that Phyllis is too dull and conventional a character to exist, but why write about her in that case?

The one interesting thing about this dreary book is the inclusion, as in all Mortimer's books, of the authentic sexual lives of the characters.  Phyllis, genteel as she is, is a sexual being, which the handyman senses and acts upon (although he's a creepy and incompetent seducer, parading before her with his "private parts" bulging "through the thin cotton" of "his patterned underpants.").  But Penelope Mortimer is no kinder to Phyllis than the handyman, and so this book is mean and sour.