Criminal binds
Lesley Glaister’s new novel may feel old-fashioned, but it makes for compelling reading during lockdown.
begins in 1920, with Clementina pregnant, but, unsettled by her wartime experience, finding both marriage and motherhood hard. Dennis is affectionate but lacking in understanding and sympathy. For him, the peace means or should mean a return to pre-war life. He is conventional and class-conscious and also dislikes any talk of the war – which he had missed – though Clementina generously tells her wartime friend Gwen that Dennis’s work on the Home Front was as necessary as theirs in France. One isn’t quite convinced that she really means this. Be that as it may, their relationship is awkward, Clementina at ease only with Dennis’s sister, Harri, a war-widow whose marriage had met with family disapproval. Glaister is acute in her exploration and depiction of family and social discord.
An accident brings Clementina into contact with another victim of the war. Vincent, a sergeant then, has a ruined face, a disfiguration which has prevented him from returning to his pre-war work as a salesman. He is now based in a pub where he fancies the motherly landlady and seeks to win her favour by helping with her young son. The chance meeting with Clementina suggests other possibilities to him, while she, looking in his ruined face – which she sketches, for she is an accomplished draughtswoman – finds the feeling of responsibility she discovered in the war returning, and with it, some of her self-confidence. So, skilfully, Glaister prepares us for a climax which is at the same time surprising and natural, and an ending which appears likely to be bleak, yet hints at resolution.
There is more than one sort of crime – crimes of commission and crimes of omission, obviously, but also crimes of the body and crimes of the spirit. There are crimes which result from a failure of understanding and the absence of empathy. All these crimes are to be encountered here. How, for instance, are we to judge Dennis’s disinclination, even refusal, to recognise that the war has rendered his habit of thought and feeling obsolete?
Clementina may have survived, even come through and reached a point of acceptance. Yet Glaister, rightly, I think, leaves the question open: “A watery sun penetrated the army-blanket cloud, casting leaden gleams on the tide, and she turned away – it really was a chilly day – and hurried towards the warmth of Harri’s.”
“Army-blanket cloud”, “leaden gleams”, “a chilly day” – all ominous and scarcely banished by the single word “warmth”.