My Friends, George and Tom

My Friends #19

by Jane Duncan

Janet Sandison comes home to the small fishing village of Achcraggan in Scotland. Behind her are ten years of happiness with her husband Twice, whose death has brought to an end their life on the island of St Jago in the West Indies. Before her lies a new career as a novelist and a return to the countryside of her childhood-and above all to George and Tom who were her closest friends, mentors and allies, in those early days. But now, Reachfar, the family croft on the hill overlooking Poyntdale Bay, has been sold and George and Tom in their old age are living cheerfully if haphazardly in Jemima Cottage in the village. Janet, George and Tom quickly take up their lives together after nearly forty years apart; Janet buys and converts an old barn on the shore and the three of them set up house. Janet, who has not found it easy to face the loss of her beloved Twice nor to adjust to the strange new world of the professional writer, rediscovers with delight that the old Reachfar values still hold a firm grip on her family and neighbours, but the one thing she cannot face is the ruin of the Reachfar croft itself. Not even the urging of her young nephews and niece- the Hungry Generation-will persuade her to climb the hill. This psychological problem is only a small part of the dramas and happenings, some sad, some joyous, which fill the pages of this enchanting and wonderfully enjoyable book. Readers of any or all of Jane Duncan's 'Friends' novels will rejoice particularly in My Friends George and Tom, for the wise and funny characters of the title have played important supporting parts in many of the earlier books and finally have a book which is triumphantly their own.

Genres: Fiction

455 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Jane Duncan was the pseudonym of Scottish writer Elizabeth Jane Cameron, best-known for her My Friends series of semi-autobiographical novels. She also wrote four novels under the name of her principal heroine Janet Sandison, and some children's books. She was born in Renton, West Dunbartonshire and brought up in the Scottish Lowlands where her father was a police officer, but much of her childhood was spent in the Highlands on the Black Isle in Easter Ross, on her grandparents' croft "The Colony", the "Reachfar" of her novels. She graduated in English from the University of Glasgow and did various secretarial jobs before serving as a Flight Officer (Intelligence), WAAF during World War II. Afterward, she lived in Jamaica for ten years, returning to Jemimaville, near "The Colony", in 1958 as a widow. In 1959 Duncan became something of a publishing sensation when Macmillan Publishers announced that it would be publishing seven of her manuscripts. The "Reachfar" (My Friends) series is narrated by Janet Sandison and follows her life (which in outline parallels that of the author) from the World War I period through to the 1960s, depicting the people she encounters and showing how her crofting upbringing influences her in whatever society and geographical location she finds herself.

Reviews

[Ika Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

And so the series comes to an end, and I can write down some of my thoughts about it.

Unlike Proust's A La Recherche (which ended where the author intended) or Sue Grafton's Alphabet series (where the author died between Y and Z, although Z is for Zero had obviously been intended as an ending from the start), the My Friends series wasn't planned and written as a single multi-volume aesthetically/narratively unified whole, which means that the question of where and how it ends is a complicated one - or at least one that I don't have good conceptual tools for thinking about ready to hand, because so many literary-critical concepts are designed for unified single works.

G&T ends the series on a perfectly satisfying note, balanced exactly between two poles. (1) It doesn't wrap everything up neatly, suggesting that the story is over and the possibilities of the narrative/world have been exhausted. In fact, it very much ends by opening onto a future, and one which isn't a radical break but has continuity with what's gone before (not a Handmaid's Tale "stepping out of the van" moment): I'm thinking of the passage where Janet says she's always thought of "always" as meaning "what has always happened", as stretching back into the past, but now she sees that it reaches into the future too. But (2) it doesn't just stop at a random point in the ongoing unfolding of stories. There's a reason why this is the point where it ends, and that's because Janet's writing has now become part of the story itself, which shifts the story onto a different footing, alters the relationship to the reader, and means that we've come to the end of this cycle.

This is perfect, because the whole series is about (and embodies in its structure) the relationship between the closed-ended nature of story and the open-ended nature of life/reality. I talked in my review of My Friend My Father about the way the series structure enables Jane Duncan to go back over parts of her life and re-emplot them, revisit them with a new understanding; this is something that happens all the time in life but is very difficult to represent in a single realist (or modernist) novel. And now the series ends just like things in reality end - really, but provisionally.

More straightforwardly, G&T ends with two classic ending topoi: And Then We Had A Big Party (the whole book is the big party!) and And Then I Wrote This Book - I said in my review of My Father that the question of "how this book came to exist" becomes part of the suspense, and from The Swallow* onwards, the story of Janet's writing career is probably the main narrative line. G&T is the only book that is set after Janet becomes a published writer, and it ends the series in at least three ways:

(1) Most obviously, Tom dies. The death of either/both George and/or Tom is strongly foreshadowed as something Janet is going to have to accept, but I was resistant to it as an ending while I was reading. Now, though, I think there's something kinder about enfolding Tom's death into the narrative/world of the series, so we don't end with it still hanging over us; we get to grieve along with Janet, and to accept another part of the end of Reachfar as a time/place - and its transmutation into a story, an ideal, and a family (on which more below...)

(2) It quietly revisits, updates, and remaps all the relationships that form the series' narrative/world. Many minor and early friends are at least name-checked - Janet looks for Rose Andrews in the London telephone book (and doesn't find her); Andra Boyd, the son of one of the Miss Boyds from the first book, is a fairly major character in G&T; Jean dies; Janet realises that her friendship with Monica has been over for some time. Many of the key characters simply show up at Janet's place in Achcraggan, so we get to see delightful things like Sir Ian sitting on a bench with George and Tom, and Sashie's first meeting with Liz. But this doesn't just feel like that thing in a long-running series where you dutifully have to go round staying hello to all the Beloved Minor Characters, I guess because it's also the plot of G&T - how is the web of relationships spun around Janet reconfigured now that she is a writer and a widow living permanently in Achcraggan? Most significantly, we learn that Tom is (and has always been) a Sandison; at the end of his life, he's resignified and acknowledged as a full member of Janet's family. More broadly, the book shows us the new, remapped 'Reachfar Family' - a term Janet begins using in The Misses Kindness, which fuzzily** refers to (a) people related to Janet by marriage or blood (Roddy Maclean is married to the sister of Janet's brother's wife, so is part of the Reachfar Family); (b) people who are very close to Janet and are bound to her in mutually reciprocal relationships of care and love, like Sashie; and (c) people who share conceptually/ imaginatively in a sort of vision of Reachfar, which is a fictional world, a style of thinking/ living, and a set of moral/ethical principles. This can extend to the people to whom Janet tells 'Reachfar stories' - and thus, though the point isn't laboured in the book, to us as readers. Hence the third way in which the book ends the series:

(3) It integrates Janet's writing life - which has previously been hidden, subterranean and parallel to her everyday life - with the life she lives with her family/friends.*** This is accomplished within the fictional world - George and Tom talk about how "we entered the writing business", and Janet's writing becomes part of the spatial and temporal structure of her daily life with George and Tom in Achcraggan. There's also a discussion of how Janet's writing (which requires solitude) is actually fuelled by her constant and intense involvement with the lives of others, and how she has managed that rhythm of engagement and withdrawal for her whole life, since she was a small child withdrawing to her Thinking Place at Reachfar. And also, there's a metafictional aspect to this, as the readers of the My Friends series enter the fictional world, both literally (as characters - the "Ladies from Sussex" who write to Janet Sandison and go past her house on tour buses) and through an acknowledgement that the reader co-creates the work:

"On board the ship coming from St Jago," Mark told [Liz], "your aunt became known as the Reachfar Lady, because she used to tell stories about Reachfar to a little girl who was on board."

"Why did you do that?" Liz asked me... "The Reachfar stories are our stories."

"I do not think you have the right of things there, Liz," Tom said. "The stories belong to Aunt Janet in the first of it and she can tell them to whoever she likes."

... "What I think is," said Duncan suddenly but quietly, "that even if Aunt Janet told the little girl about the ferret in Miss Tulloch's shop, it would be different to her from what it was to us. This little girl was from England, you said, and she has never seen a shop like Miss Tulloch's or even a ferret likely. The person that hears the story makes it different."

I looked at the boy with admiration. "Sometimes," I said, "I think that Duncan is the only person in this family with any real sense. Of course the person who hears the story or reads the story contributes just as much to it as the person who tells it or writes it."

So now that we are some of The Friends, the series has to end.

Okay, I just want to mention two quick things about G&T specifically, and then reflect a bit about the series as a whole.

Firstly, in this book, we find out that one of Janet's nephews, Sandy Tom, has Down syndrome - it takes his mother a long time to come to terms with this, but by the end of the book Sandy Tom is accepted and loved by everyone in the family as a person like all the others, rather than being seen as radically different or impaired in any way. This is an extraordinary move because children (and adults) with intellectual disabilities have been portrayed previously in the series as monsters - Georgie in My Friend Flora is a snuffling grotesque who gets sexual gratification from torturing dogs, and a baby in another book (I forget which one) who has "something missing in his mind" is seen as an infinite tragedy. So it's fantastic to see the world of My Friends expanding in this way and acknowledging the full humanity of another group of people that Janet has previously feared and/or denigrated. As with the racism stuff (which I talked about in my review of My Father),the series form enables Jane Duncan to do an amazing thing here, which is to represent/ enact the protagonist-author's overcoming of a prejudice or coming to a deeper understanding without turning the whole book into a narrative about The Awakening Of A White Abled Person Who Has Learned And Grown, which is just a gross narrative. It's such a fabulous solution to the problem of how to write ethically from the position of heir to a fucked-up literary tradition or way of thinking - it's just a shame you have to write something of the length of In Search Of Lost Time for it to work.

Secondly, ANDRA BOYD IS A BIG QUEER HOORAY. I was EXTREMELY worried that Janet would end up marrying him - interestingly, the book very deftly managed to foreshadow both that Janet would remain a univira, and that she would marry Andra, which produced agonising suspense/tension. Fortunately, Sashie explains to Janet that Andra's "servant", David, is actually his boyfriend, which clears up several plot points. But what's interesting about this to me is a point that Lynne Pearce makes in Feminism and the Politics of Reading**** about a sort of metafictional level of suspense in reading: it's not about what will happen in the plot (an immersive suspense which takes the fictional world as sort-of-real, on its own terms) but about whether the writer is going to fuck it up - something which is surely highly familiar to anyone who watches serial TV drama. Anyway, this level of suspense is always activated for me around queer characters, especially in mid-C20 fiction where queer characters are rarely named as such, opening up a whole space of ambiguity and undecidability about whether certain characters "are", in fact (in fiction?), gay. It's also present in Jane Duncan, even though she almost always does know - and tell us - when her characters are gay, because of her stubborn insistence that Sashie de Marnay, the high-camp half-French half-Russian ballet dancer and aesthete, is not, in fact, A Homosexual.***** So it is always a treat to have a character explicitly identified as gay.

And so! My long read is over, the My Friends books have gone away, and I am looking forward to my next reread of them. But first, a few reflections on why they are so good.

It's not the writing, interestingly - or not on the sentence level - and that challenges me to think harder about what I mean by "good writing." I would usually say that the greatest human accomplishment is putting an underrepresented feeling or experience into exactly the right verbal form - a fit between a beautiful, elegant, or otherwise just-right expression, and an observation about reality that hasn't been made a million times before (or that is made new through the expression). Jane Duncan doesn't really do this, though - her sentences are fine (and get better through the series, as she calms down a bit and stops having to adorn all her observations with slightly self-deprecating, self-conscious riffs and addresses to the reader), but there aren't any that stop me in my tracks and make me think: yes, that's it. I really value her descriptions of depression, toxic grief, hopelessness and dissociation, and find them highly recognisable - but as descriptions, as art made of words, they don't give me anything new. So I think I value them more because she includes them - because her total picture of the world, as made and remade through the series, fits these emotional states into the whole pattern, gives them their proper place and proportion. She reminds me a bit of Diana Wynne Jones: more than the verbal texture of the books, it's the stories, the characters, the situations, the feelings and the ideas - the counsel they have to offer - that I love.

I'm almost out of characters, so I'll put this in a review of the Swallow, but another thing the serial form makes possible is an unusually effective (unprecedented?) way of representing a long-term relationship, the "marriage" between Janet and Twice.

And through it all there is Janet, the narrator, who, in her complexly interwoven relationship with Jane Duncan the implied author, is one of the greatest technical accomplishments in the history of literature.******

I can't tell you how easy it is to make me hate an authorial narrator. I wouldn't say my reading mode was stuck on "suspicious", but I certainly slide very easily into a sense that narrators are self-serving, manipulative and/or self-deceived - I probably side with people other than the author/narrator in the majority of memoirs that I read. And yet! I had all but finished the My Friends series before it even occurred to me to think about how I never, for a moment, felt a gap between the narrator's account of things and things as they must have been in the narrative world. I mean - okay, I've just talked about how Janet sees black people as a lower race and intellectually disabled people as monsters in the earlier books, so it's not that I think Janet is right about everything she says about the world. Maybe the gap I don't see is between Janet's and my understanding of herself? (Another reason why G&T has to be the last book - because I could, if I let myself, turn a suspicious eye on the whole "I just tripped and fell into this incredibly lucrative and successful writing career, I am just a Heilan peasant at heart" narrative thread.) But Janet is something that I think, off the top of my head, is unparalleled - a narrator-author with a vividly drawn and specific character (and from the very start of the series it's consistently emphasised that things happen to/around Janet because of what she's a "person like"), who I enjoy as a character, on whom we often turn an amused "oh, that Janet" kind of eye, BUT who is also an entirely reliable narrator.

I think this is partly because Janet, as a character in the books, obviously enjoys (and spends a lot of time) talking and thinking about other people: what makes them tick, why they are the way they are. She does this with Twice, and I do it with my gf, and it is an extremely pleasurable activity, and the books are, to some extent, framed as an extension of that conversation to/with the reader. Which is something you can see as a continuous thread in women's domestic/sentimental/"light" fiction from the nineteenth century to the present day - the idea that fiction and storytelling is a conversational relationship between author and reader, and that that conversation is woven into the daily routines of the reader's life, rather than the more masculine tradition of print as an autonomous sphere where the author and reader confront one another in a realm purified of, and strictly separate from, non-aesthetic experience. But I often see this move - "this isn't a book, it's just a cosy chat between friends" - as a somewhat defensive, self-deprecating one, almost an alibi ("don't worry, I'm not asking to be read on the same plane as Mr Joyce, you don't need to pay any attention to me!") which accepts (even while it subverts) the lower status of this form of art. What I think Jane Duncan does is take very seriously the informal, interpersonal forms of storytelling which create and recreate social networks and human relationships, and use these as a basis for her form of art.

*OMG I have JUST realised that we NEVER FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS TO PERSEY and I REALLY THOUGHT WE WOULD

** This fuzziness - which I envisage as a kind of fuzziness created by the existence of overlapping, semi-transparent layers - is another way in which the My Friends series does a better job of representing reality than a standalone novel could, because families (or friendship groups or other forms of kin network) are this kind of fuzzy, provisional, open-weave structure which is both bounded and not bounded.

***Ooh. The line between 'family' and 'friends' is an interesting thing to think about, especially since family members only become titular Friends in the last third of the series, which alternates 'Reachfar Family' members (My Father, the Hungry Generation, Sashie, George and Tom) with others - the Macleans, the Swallow, the Misses Kindness.

Before that, some of the Friends are actual close friends, like Monica; some are minor characters in the books with whom Janet has an ambivalent or even antagonistic relationship, but whom she comes to understand and to be able to fit into the networked set of relationships which makes up her sense of what the world is and what is possible within it. Often she comes to a more compassionate understanding of them (Annie, Rose, Cousin Emmie), but sometimes it's actually a more negative evaluation (Muriel). The Macleans and the Misses Kindness are more complicated. And the Swallow is an exceptional case, because she's only a visitor to Janet's world (hence the name), not a permanent part of her reality- Persey escapes the frame, like the monster at the end of

****This is a genuinely under-read classic on reading/reception theory. If you read academic books, I would really recommend this one - for some reason it's not widely known, but it has provided me with at least three concepts about reading that I've never found elsewhere and that are absolutely central to how people actually read.

*****My gf resolves this very happily for me by pointing out that Jane-Janet become more and more accepting of homosexuality throughout the course of the series, but unfortunately she has painted herself into a corner very early by insisting that Sashie is only pretending to be gay to hide a physical disability, and thus that only prejudiced people and/or dupes would believe he was really gay, while the trusted insiders know the secret that he is not. After that set-up it's just not feasible for Sashie to come out after all, so he ends up being asexual with a particular sympathy for homosexuals.

******I WILL FIGHT YOU ON THIS

[Bridget · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have just finished this book, the last in the Jane Duncan My Friends series having started with the first and worked my way through to the last, I bought them all in abebooks - some being easier to get hold of than others!
I read them all as a youngster, I remember going to the travelling library in the village I grew up in with my father and we would both look to see if they had My Friends books in. Consequently we read them all in the wrong order but loved them anyway.
This is the first time I have read them all in the right order, pretty much back-to-back with a small interlude when I realised I had not got My Friend Sashie and had to wait for it to arrive from America via abebooks.
I love these books, the characters, the attitudes, the way the character of the narrator grows, changes and develops as she grows up, meets more people and thinks more about life and the world.
They are heartwarming and entertaining but also offer so much more than that.
I can't recommend these highly enough and I would love to chat with anyone about these if you enjoy them too.

[Joy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Janet is home from the West Indies, except that hardly anyone she used to know still lives in Achcraggen. It seems that family is all she has left as she tries to adjust to her new career as a successful novelist. However, Janet being Janet, new friend after new friend is soon following her to Achcraggen. In all the chaos of keeping house for her "uncles" George and Tom and their many visitors, Janet learns to attach herself to the things that are most important.

Such a warm account of lives and deaths in a small Scottish village.

My favorite Contemporary Novel read of 2013, 2016 and 2018; and reread of 2017 and 2019.

Read 20 times

[Alexis Lloyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love these books although they were written a long time ago! Jane Duncan a Scot, who lived in the Caribbean,for many years, wrote her books in the linen cupboard because her husband didn't approve. These are funny gentle books that lift your spirit. Duncan also writes as Janet Sandison.

[Fiona Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The final book in the Janet Sandison series and it brings us back to where we started - the Black Isle. Duncan manages to bring all the main characters of her back story, including Monica and her St Jago friends, to her new home in Achraggan. It ties up loose ends from book 1 in a very satisfying way and allows us to deal with death (again, through a veil of tears). She gives the last words to Sashie...and we leave Janet back where she belongs, with friends. This book was published in 1976, and Jane Duncan died in October of the same year. Whether she had another Reachfar book written is debatable...but, in my opinion, this is the perfect ending to her beautiful and moving series about the interconnectedness of people.

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the only Jane Duncan that I own, which is a pity becaus I have a bit of a Duncan craving on, and these days you never seem to see her books in the public libraries, which were once a reliable source.

[Janet Bird · Rating 5 out of 5]

I treated myself to this book for my 60th birthday back in the day. £100 good grief. Worth every penny imho. Love all this series and her other series as Janet Sandison too. I intend to read them all again soon.

[Dorothy Golding]

Want to read it.please put it in my library

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Janet returns to Achcraggan and her books take off. Loved seeing George and Tom again.

[Sallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read many of the My Friend b0oks by Jane Duncan years ago. Now to remember which ones I have read. My sister introduced me to them back in the 80s.