A Charmed Circle

by Anna Kavan

By one of the most original writers of the twentieth century"" ( Reference & Research Book News), this early novel foreshadows Kavan's later development. ""This 1929 novel, set in an English industrial town, depicts the lives of a woman and her children who suffer at the hands of an oppressive husband and father."" - Library Journal. ""Kavan's prose is like pollen, frail yet enduring. She is de Quincey's heir, Kafka's sister and a true writer."" - Brian Aldiss.

Genres: Fiction, 20th Century, Novels

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1929

About the author

Anna Kavan was born "Helen Woods" in France on April 10, 1901 to wealthy expatriate British parents.

Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson, her first married name. These early novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work. I Am Lazarus (1945), a collection of short stories which explored the inner mindscape of the psychological explorer, heralded the new style and content of Kavan's writing. The change in her writing style and physical appearance coincided with a mental breakdown. During this time, Helen also renamed herself Anna Kavan after a character in her own novel Let Me Alone.

Around 1926 Anna became addicted to heroin. Her addiction has been described as an attempt to self-medicate rather than recreational. Kavan made no apologies for her heroin usage. She is popularly supposed to have died of a heroin overdose. In fact she died of heart failure, though she had attempted suicide several times during her life.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

While Anna Kavan’s writing certainly advanced in quality beyond the prose found in this first of her novels (published under her married name Helen Ferguson), it remains a penetrating account of one family’s stifling, insular home life. Ensconced in their walled estate as the ugly, noisy town of Hannington encroaches on them from all sides, the Deane family consists of two daughters, Olive and Beryl; a son, Ronald; their mother, the prim, rigid writer Mrs. Deane, and their father, the reclusive and wooden Dr. Deane, who is no longer in practice and spends the bulk of his days barricaded in his study with his books. Interestingly, while Dr. Deane speaks the least by far of any of the characters in the novel, in those rare moments when he does open his mouth he renders the most perceptive observations about this doomed family; first to his son Ronald upon his return from a failed job experience in London:

’Failures, yes,’ said the doctor. ‘Failures without initiative. Slaves. We’re all bound here. Not one of us is free. You think you are free to leave this house tomorrow like your friend Christofferson, but you’re not. You can’t leave it. You tried once and you had to come back. You’re not free.’

And then later to his eldest daughter, Olive, as she sees her own opportunity to escape the strict confines of her family life begin to dissolve:

There is some defect in us all, some flaw, some canker of the soul that holds us back from fruition. Life is too hard for us. We yearn and struggle and rebel, but in the end we are always vanquished because of that obscure disability. We cannot succeed because we are not free. Some inhibition, some fatal limitation, binds us, from which we can never escape.

These brief monologues that the doctor delivers in the presence of his children sum up the main themes running through the novel. It is a tale of one miserable family and how their collective repressed emotions and inability to effectively communicate chain them together while simultaneously keeping them all at arm’s length from each other. There is no hope of freedom for them, and the only release they ever find is in the petty words and deeds which they inflict upon each other. The cold void at the core of the novel is one that will continue throughout Kavan’s oeuvre, even as her prose grows sharper, leaner, and more experimental in style.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anna Kavan published six novels between 1929 and 1937 under her own married name, Helen Ferguson. Realist and lower-keyed, they barely portend the striking surrealist/experimental work she would later publish after breakdown and name change, despite the name Anna Kavan having been drawn directly from a character of this period. Published when she was just 28, A Charmed Circle is her earliest work.

There's a certain kind of literary contrivance that I find terribly aggravating, where characters find themselves entirely trapped in authorial machinations designed to drive them towards some pre-conceived ends, whether via their own assigned natures or by the coincidences and congruences demanded by the story. I associate this sort of thing, in its annoying aspects, with 19th century melodrama and any era of satire. Of course, any complaint with with this sort of shoe-horning of characters and events is part of a larger dissatisfaction with -- or at least awareness of -- the constructed narrative. Of course, I'm not especially into the naturalist alternatives to contrived plotting, and there are many, many extremely contrived stories that I love. I suppose it all matters what ends we're contriving towards. If it is an interesting concept that warrants the effort, I'm all for it. But if we're contriving towards lame satiric gags, or forcing a point that couldn't be made without forcing, or trying to bring a "realistic" drama to its tragic ends, I'm going to become irritated. Specifically in the last case, forcing a contrived tragedy actually works the opposite of its intended effect on me: usually my empathy shuts off as soon as I notice the attempt to manipulate the story (and my own emotions) and any pathos is lost.

All of which is an explanation of why Anna Kavan's realist writing of the 20s is a rather dicey proposition for me. Not even halfway through A Charmed Circle, I had a pretty good idea of where we were being directed, mostly via the inexorable natures programmed into our sibling protagonists and their stifling family home. Fortunately, Kavan seems less interested here in high melodrama, and heads off the kinds of cheap explosions another might apply in favor of a precise calibration and observation of relative psychological states between the principle cast. Which, while interesting, serves to remind the Kavan-familiar reader of the ways in which her later work codes its psychology directly into its description and storytelling, typically avoiding such overt explanation. On the other hand (and excitingly for the Kavan-obsessive) her later finesse in conveying shadings of psychology with landscape and weather is already in effect alongside her more overt techniques, foreshadowing the glaciers to come.

Still, my interest in early Kavan is entirely informed by late Kavan. In its own right, this is a decent, subdued psychological novel, told in precise, confident language, of toxic familial relations and the prison of home (especially for the independent-minded young women that Kavan must have been). But see, it's inseparable from my pre-existing fascination. On its own, I'm afraid, this probably just wouldn't be all that notable or memorable. But, as I said, there was much, much more to come. Here's a bit that looks towards that most clearly, perhaps:

In time, the builders came. They set up houses of a different kind; neat, ugly little boxes strung together in rows. The rows, too, strung together. Surprisingly, they extended and met, forming mean streets that devoured the unresisting land. Fields were eaten away almost overnight. People went for their yearly holidays and returned four short weeks later to find the landscape strangely altered. Everywhere was an alien and unwelcome activity.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kavan’s first novel is a doom-laden affair, where two spinster-in-waiting sisters struggle to escape from the airless, loveless clutches of their parental home, in desperate seek of a mere crumb of affection or direction. Themes of stifling and miserable family lives are predominant in Kavan’s works, a grim reflection of her own bleak upbringing under a narcissistic mother, and in this novel there are echoes of the later masterpiece A Scarcity of Love with its unrelenting claustrophobic tone. Conventional in prose, indulging in the Jamesian overabundance of description, A Charmed Circle (sarcasm intended) is still a formidable first from a stellar and neglected talent and worth a read for devotees of her later work.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There is some defect in us all, some flaw, some canker of the soul that holds us back from fruition. Life is too hard for us. We yearn and struggle and rebel, but in the end we are always vanquished because of that obscure disability. We cannot succeed because we are not free. Some inhibition, some fatal limitation, binds us, from which we can never escape."

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kavan's first novel, from 1929 (originally published under her married name of "Helen Ferguson") is surprising for how much of the post-War themes are already present. We have a depressive, enclosed family of "slaves" socially and psychologically isolated in an old dwelling that has been hemmed in by the rise of the modern world. Attempts by the children to escape just lead them to further confusion and manipulation, as the glittering city in the distance is also a realm of cold-hearted egoists. Everyone here is calculating and dissimulating, even when they feel themselves to be running on the rails of strict convention and propriety. The differences between this and later works like "A Scarcity Of Love" is simply that the latter is a more washed-out monochrome universe in which the specificities of place have disappeared, whereas the charmed ones do at least inhabit a world that contains Soho and Knightsbridge.

[Amelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Ice a while back, I wanted to read more Anna Kavan and picked this one more or less at random. This is a very character-driven book, and the characters are carefully and fully fleshed out. But these fully fleshed out characters spend the whole book repeatedly sabotaging themselves and each other whenever any of them tries to escape the toxic influence of their house and family, which made for an extremely stressful read. Excellent, but super anxiety-inducing.

[Edward Champion · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an early novel -- before Anna Kavan's great reinvention -- and, as such, lacks the bold and fierce originality of later novels like ICE. It involves an embittered family living in an house, with the young trying to get out of this hellhole. But despite the promising family dynamic, it's not on the level of Christina Stead. It's clear from reading this that Kavan was meant to do more original things.

[Annette Kane · Rating 2 out of 5]

very dated in every way