A Crystal Ball
Elizabeth Jane Howard's 'The Long View,' her second novel, is one of those that is a lot easier to read than to describe. Published in 1956, it has a five-part structure that takes us backwards through the life of Antonia Fleming, from 1950 to 1926, when we meet her as a young girl about to be gently deceived, baffled and bullied into wifehood. A story written in reverse! It sounds complicated, but Howard is so in command of her characters and their motives that it makes for a riveting read - the page-turner that teases you towards that elusive promise of everything making sense once you have been granted an understanding of how it began.
The story opens by launching us straight into a dinner party and the long-established, very dark dysfunction between the central married couple, Conrad and Antonia Fleming. He is brusque, chillingly indifferent, while she is on the verge of breakdown, clearly because of the loneliness brought on by the harsh treatment at the hands of her husband. Their children have left home and she has no one. Antonia and Conrad's social life continues to function, brittle and shallow, while underneath all is misery and chaos. It is gripping. It leaves the reader burning to know the HOW and WHY behind the situation.
Howard's power as a writer stems not only from the depths and range of the emotions she explores, but the fact that she is not interested in the game of passing judgment, even on the most unappealing of her protagonists. Conrad is cruel and domineering, while Antonia flounders, utterly lost; but there are always reasons people develop and behave as they do, and Howard plumbs every aspect of them with the forensic eye and wisdom of a psychologist. The fact is, no one is entirely monstrous, or entirely saintly; nor is there a crystal ball for seeing the consequences of the decisions we make.
By the time we reach the fifth and final part of the story, and learn how Conrad and Antonia first met, the pieces of the jigsaw are really beginning to join up. Already rejected once in love, we find a very young, impressionable and therefore vulnerable Antonia, easy prey for a man like Conrad, older and already immersed in male privilege, along with disillusions which he is ill-equipped - and little inclined - to examine. It becomes obvious too, how both characters are as much the products - and 'victims' - of the society into which they were born as their respective upbringings and personalities. The writing is on the wall. But only the novelist can see it.
The best books for me are the ones that stay with you long after you have read them. I finished 'The Long View' months ago now and think of it often, not just for its perspicacity and compelling storyline, but for the questions it raises about the ways our lives take shape and how much agency we really have over the paths we choose.
The story opens by launching us straight into a dinner party and the long-established, very dark dysfunction between the central married couple, Conrad and Antonia Fleming. He is brusque, chillingly indifferent, while she is on the verge of breakdown, clearly because of the loneliness brought on by the harsh treatment at the hands of her husband. Their children have left home and she has no one. Antonia and Conrad's social life continues to function, brittle and shallow, while underneath all is misery and chaos. It is gripping. It leaves the reader burning to know the HOW and WHY behind the situation.
Howard's power as a writer stems not only from the depths and range of the emotions she explores, but the fact that she is not interested in the game of passing judgment, even on the most unappealing of her protagonists. Conrad is cruel and domineering, while Antonia flounders, utterly lost; but there are always reasons people develop and behave as they do, and Howard plumbs every aspect of them with the forensic eye and wisdom of a psychologist. The fact is, no one is entirely monstrous, or entirely saintly; nor is there a crystal ball for seeing the consequences of the decisions we make.
By the time we reach the fifth and final part of the story, and learn how Conrad and Antonia first met, the pieces of the jigsaw are really beginning to join up. Already rejected once in love, we find a very young, impressionable and therefore vulnerable Antonia, easy prey for a man like Conrad, older and already immersed in male privilege, along with disillusions which he is ill-equipped - and little inclined - to examine. It becomes obvious too, how both characters are as much the products - and 'victims' - of the society into which they were born as their respective upbringings and personalities. The writing is on the wall. But only the novelist can see it.
The best books for me are the ones that stay with you long after you have read them. I finished 'The Long View' months ago now and think of it often, not just for its perspicacity and compelling storyline, but for the questions it raises about the ways our lives take shape and how much agency we really have over the paths we choose.
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