What lies beneath

Hutchinson, 17.99

Review by ALLAN MASSIE

STANLEY MIDDLETON, born in 1919, didn’t publish his first novel till 1958, a comparatively late start to a literary career. This is usually a good thing, allowing the novelist to accumulate experience before he starts using it in fiction. In Middleton’s case it had certainly been that. If he hasn’t quite managed a novel a year ever since, he has come close to doing so.

On the face of it there’s not much variety to Middleton’s novels. They are all set in the English Midlands, usually in his home city, Nottingham. His characters are mostly middle-class, professional men, teachers (as Middleton himself was), lawyers, accountants, businessmen. They have aged with their author and tend nowadays to be retired, as they are in this new novel, though even the recently retired are a generation younger than their creator. They rarely suffer much from financial worries and the outward tenor of their lives usually seems serene. There is seldom much of a plot in his books, though there is always a story, a narrative that keeps jogging along, from day to day. There are frequently incidents which may be called dramatic - deaths, marital break-ups, here even a murder - but the most interesting action tends to go in the characters’ heads. It is what they make of the world around them, how they judge it and each other, that is our principal concern.

Middleton passes for a naturalistic novelist and to some extent is. He presents us with a version of everyday life as it might be experienced by the folk next door. He is precise in rendering the details: what their houses look like, what is growing in their gardens, what they eat and drink. But all novels are artificial and often the closer they seem to be to what we agree to call real life, the more artificial they are. This is the case with Middleton.

The action in his books is carried on mostly in conversation. He has always had a good ear for dialogue. Nevertheless his dialogue is only superficially naturalistic. His characters are not only far more inquisitive than people are permitted to be in real life; their enquiries are nearly always answered. They are rarely told to go away and mind their own businesses. People say what they think as they don’t in real life. They are put on the stage by their author and we get to know them by what they are made to reveal. Middleton’s dialogue is actually as artificial and artful as Ivy Compton-Burnett’s, but the veneer of naturalism conceals this and the reader may think he is getting a plain slice of life.

Middleton is concerned with what his characters have made of their life, of their marriages, and their careers. What has it all amounted to? He puts them in the witness box and they are required to account for themselves. He is a moralist, but not a narrow one. Here, for instance, there is the suggestion that a spot of adultery may even strengthen a marriage, because the adulterer may feel under an obligation to behave better to wife or husband than might have been the case if he or she had been faithful.

Middleton is concerned with what goes on below the surface of lives, what people feel, dream about, hope for, resent, fear - all the things that in real life may be kept hidden. His other strength is his characterisation. He presents his people in the round, finding admirable qualities often where you might not expect them. His sympathy is wide because his understanding goes deep. There is the occasional clumsiness - questions asked to which the speaker, one thinks, must already know the answer, but this scarcely matters.

The book is as humane, intelligent and compelling as ever. Anyone coming to Middleton fresh has a real treat in store; there are some 40 novels in his backlist to catch up on, though I don’t know how many are still in print. Not as many as should be, I daresay.