Allow me to begin with a digression about Gosford Park. Whilst it’s certainly a great film, it has one major flaw. No, I’m not referring to Stephen Fry’s inspector, although his performance does feel feel like a major tonal misjudgement with the rest of the narrative. An intrusion into this naturalistic and closely observed world of a character who surely properly belongs in a parody of Agatha Christie. In fact, I’d argue that it almost manages to unbalance the rest of the film. No, the film’s real major flaw is retrospective: the boost that it appears it gave to the career of Julian Fellowes. I’ve read somewhere that little of his actual script survives, that it was used primarily as a basis for the improvisations of the cast. If that is the case, then we should be grateful that the producers engaged the services of Robert Altman, giving the ageing American filmmaker the opportunity to produce a final late (almost) masterpiece.
Nevertheless, Fellows’s script shared in the adulation - didn’t it win awards? - and now we have Downton Abbey. Personally I’d thought that Downton Abbey was nothing more than recycled story lines stolen from Upstairs, Downstairs, only this time from the point of view of the masters. A waste of my time, so I’ve not bothered to watch it. Only a lot of people appear to have latched onto Isobel Colegate’s 1980 novel, The Shooting Party, as a source, taking it as a guide to work out what might happen in future episodes (although surely the end is easy to predict; the aristocracy declines and the house is now administered by the National Trust, assuming it wasn’t demolished after the Second World War. In other words, History happens, despite whatever the nostalgic longings of the creators and audience might wish for). The Shooting Party has recently been republished as a Penguin Classics, with an admiring introduction from Fellowes (Fellowes seems to have a sideline in providing introductions to books which can be made to fit into his idealised reactionary view of an idealised British past), although I think I’m correct in saying that he hadn't actually had read the book when he created Downton Abbey.
*
The Shooting Party was itself made into a film in 1985 - in outline it sounds very like that ur-text of the country house narrative, Le Regle de Jue - and won awards. It’s clearly the work of hers which is going to be remembered before the rest of her work. My paperback of her later 1991 novel already advertises itself on the cover as being by the ‘Author of…’. No doubt because of the film.
*
“I can do all sorts of voices. I’m virtually a ventriloquist.”
What I wasn’t expecting to find when I started reading The Summer of the Royal Visit was such a visionary novel. A novel which is much closer in feel to the writing of Peter Ackroyd and A.S. Byatt than the kind of historical fiction with which I was mentally associating her work. It makes me eager to actually read The Shooting Party, and wonder what kind of novel I’m going to find.
Which is not to say that it doesn’t provide plenty of the pleasures of historical fiction. There’s plenty of finely judged detail of the past. We’re in a period which is towards the end of Victoria’s reign, in a provincial city which is now a faded reflection of its former glory. I take it to be Bath, with the references to the healing waters, but it’s only ever referred to as ‘the City’, or else more intimately as ‘our City’. Two larger entwined public events overshadow the narrative: the royal visit of the title in which Victoria blesses the opening of a new library and presides over a royal procession through the City, and an architectural competition over the design for a new hotel which is at least partly intended to revive the fortunes and reverse the decline of the City.
In the foreground we have a varied cast which includes the dignitaries and provincial nobility of the City, retired soldiery, a deceitful scholar engaged in a study of the Druids, a theosophist, a priest struggling with his faith, and a youthful poet who is suffering from consumption.
Described like that, it might easily sound as though many of the characters are all late Victorian cliches. There’s something in that I suppose, although Colegate is careful not to simply give in to cliche. Her consumptive poet, Peter Tilsley, dies before producing any work of significance. Yet far from being an undiscovered genius, a Keats at the other end of the century, we're explicitly told that his work is mostly sentimental and without a great deal of merit. He’s actually the type who longs to produce work of real visionary quality, but who simply lacks the talent. We can say that all great writers start with the longing to be a writer, but there must be as many (if not more) who have the same longing but are never able to achieve their ambitions. Sometimes this will be because they are unable or unwilling to put in the work required, but as often it must be because they simply lacked the necessary talent.
But in many ways, these are as much our ‘cliches’ of the Victorian past, an attempt to rediscover the doubt and sexuality that we imagine must have lurked behind the stiff facade of Victorian culture as it's come down to us. The pieces that novelists of the time were unable (or unwilling) to include. The central character in the novel (if it can be said to have one) is one Stephen Collingwood, a priest who has buried himself in his vocation following the death of his wife in childbirth, but finds himself unable to properly connect with the impoverished parishioners among whom he lives, and finds himself doubting his faith.
There’s also a modern narrator providing us with the story the story. A retired historian, he’s a familiar figure from works such as Graham Swift’s Waterland and Maureen Duffy’s Capital, equally visionary novels with ambiguous claims on history. Remaining nameless throughout, he intrudes at various points to discourse on both the past and his late twentieth-century present. His motives for researching this tale of his city stem from his reaction against the contemporary political situation of the world; he is “…simply looking for someone who went this way before me and left a sign on the wall beside the road.”
Ever so quietly then, this is a profoundly anti-Thatcher novel (it was published in 1991, after all). It speaks for the value of community, a value which is extended to all. It's not at all the kind of reactionary nostalgia which produces a work like Downton Abbey, but a novel that digs into the late Victorian past, exposing its nerve endings and moral failings. In fact, much of the material feels like it could easily belong in an up to date novel about the contemporary early nineties, only displaced back a century or more. One of the secrets lurking behind the Victorian facade is the abuse of children, an issue that became incredibly prevalent in various parts of 90s culture. Arguably we still have a culture which is obsessed with childhood, for better or worse.
The other aspect of 90s culture, which we seem to have moved past in some ways as it's simultaneously become a part of the cultural air, is the popular desemination of post modernism. The winning hotel design for instance, first seen in a vision from the novel’s fake psychic, Madame Sofia, consists of, "Portals and porticos, arches, window on window, an immense thing, and then we have turrets and lookout posts and what can seem to be an little houses from Simla on the roof.” No doubt this is a parody of late Victorian eclecticism, but in it’s profusion of details and borrowed influences, it also feels inescapably postmodern. Elsewhere the city is repeatedly likened to a stage set.
The are no grand narratives. Nothing is certain here. We might even define it as a kind of ‘radical’ nostalgia.
*
In theory (and goodness, hasn't post modernism generated a lot of theory!), post modernism elides any stable difference between the present and the past. I don't feel that that has ever been my experience though. The proliferation of pastiches and knowingly fake histories that postmodernism has produced seems rather to serve to reinforce a huge distance between the present and the past. It's a very discomforting sensibility.
*
I’ll leave you with our narrator’s lovely, melancholy consideration of history's losses:
You can’t teach history for thirty years and be against change; equally you can’t help noticing that it nearly always brings loss as well as gain. The ratio is hard to determine afterwards and almost impossible at the time.
*
Actually, no, one more thing which I haven’t managed to fit into the main body of my review. Partly because I find it so confusing.
This is also a novel which is concerned to reclaim and acknowledge the visionary aspects of Victorian culture (hence the theosophist, Madame Sofia, and the research into Druids).
But this also creates a problem, in the character of Petchumah, the South Indian wife of Wilf, the retired soldier with whom Stephen Colegate lodges. The novel is clearly acknowledging the reality of Empire in the nineteenth century in a way that I think is often overlooked: the relationships which occurred between soldiers and women from the cultures they were ostensibly oppressing. It's not a meeting of equals between the two cultures, rather it's an acknowledgement of the messiness of humans, the fact that people can't be fitted straightforwardly into a convenient cliche. Consequently, Petchumah has been brought back to our cold island. We hear little of her own voice; mostly, she's talked about by other characters, including her husband. Neither of them are principal characters in the text. But I still feel that her presence in the text is one of its strengths, because it jars nicely with our typical stereotype of what late Victorian reality and culture was like.
Like everyone else in the town she is viewing the royal procession, accompanied by her husband, Peter Tilsley and Stephen Colgate. As the monarch passes, Peter’s enthusiasm gets the better of him, and the writing rises to a genuinely visionary pitch:
Petchumah, so pushed forward, put her hands together in her traditional greeting and bowed her head in homage. The black-clad figure turned, leant forward, seemed to speak; the royal hands - both royal hands - were half outstretched. In this small northern city the might and mystery of India, the gardens, the temples, palaces, the tiger-haunted forests, the snow-covered hills, the stone-carved elephants four thousand years old, the sacred rivers, the merciless deserts, the ancient cruel gods, bowed in homage in the person of Petchumah in her cerise and blue and silver sari before the plump elderly widow of German extraction into whose slightly protuberant eyes an extraordinary tenderness had come. Again and again Petchumah made her obeisance. Again and again the palms, the plains, the crowded bazaars, the ancient suffering, the distant wisdom based themselves, and the outstretched hands seemed to wish to bless, and the royal lips when they moved to say - or at least Peter said that was what they had said - ‘Beloved India.’
It’s really hard to know quite how to take this passage, to understand what’s going on here. India is reduced to a series of familiar cliches (and it all sounds like rather a lot to place on the shoulders a poor single individual too). At the same time, Victoria’s mystique is punctured. Throughout her appearance in the novel the Queen's magnificence simply dazzles all of the residents of the City with whom she comes into contact. Here, we see her as she was, the elderly woman who would have much preferred to stay hidden away in mourning and had to be forced to engage with her subjects. At the same time, any safe notion of Englishness is complicated by the noting of the Queen’s ethnicity. So, seriously, what the hell is going on here? There’s undoubtedly something deeply offensive about it. But it also feels like an extraordinary balancing act? The writing is genuinely stirring, if also somewhat mystifying.
If anything, it feels as though the writing has got out of control of the author here. The novel contains several other genuinely visionary moments which are much more successfully achieved.
But it also alerts us to a potential pitfall of the visionary mode: it all depends on just whose vision you’re in.
