Book review: Worth, by Jon Canter

Worth

by Jon Canter

Jonathan Cape, 280pp, £16.99

Review by Allan Massie

Comedy can offer an escape from the realities of everyday existence; nobody has ever read Wodehouse, or watched a Marx Brothers movie, for a criticism of the way we live. Yet comedy comes in different guises. Sometimes it is sharp. Congreve thought the business of the comic poet was “to paint the vices and follies of human kind”. More generally comedy arises from the difference or discrepancy between aspiration and achievement. This is the sort of comedy Jon Canter deals in. His characters seek a satisfaction which requires them to make what is illusory real.

Richard works in advertising, unhappily. He has had a long relationship with a dominating and rather ghastly woman. Then he meets Sarah, a solicitor, also emerging from an unsatisfying affair. They fall in love. Each seems to the other to recognise what their previous lovers have failed to recognise: that is, their essential self.

They resolve to get out of London, to a cottage in a Suffolk village, named Worth. It is not really a village, only a collection of houses on a road, for it no longer has what makes a village – church, school, pub. Still, they are escaping the rat race, and the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life, even though at first they become reverse commuters, returning to London for weekends.

They make a friendship with neighbours. It quickly stalls. Sarah offers them the wrong sort of food (pasta with beetroot) , and Keith, a handyman, asks them if they have left London to escape the blacks. Then a more sympathetic neighbour, Catherine, arrives to occupy the next-door cottage. Richard and Sarah are both delighted by her; indeed she inspires a sort of tremulous frenzy of adoration in them, at first anyway. But is she just what she appears to be? Is she inveigling herself into their lives for some not perhaps agreeable purpose? She speaks of a sister who tries to control her life and is making it hell. Her presence causes discord between them. Meanwhile the rural idyll begins to disappoint. Richard’s attempt to make a living as a book illustrator refuses to take off; Sarah’s work as a lawyer with a charity is not just what she had hoped for. And then there is a murder …

The plot is slow-moving and complicated, less gripping than it should be. This is partly because Richard, the narrator, is too verbose, too given to explanation and speculation. It will be a tolerant reader who doesn’t quite often find himself urging him to get on with it. Moreover, Richard’s treatment of other characters is inconsistent; some are drawn in the round, others presented as grotesques. No doubt this is how, to a large extent, we often see people in real life. Yet the inconsistency nags, disconcertingly. One could wish also for dialogue that was less woolly, rather sharper.

Nevertheless there is a great deal to enjoy, and the weaknesses of the novel are venial. Canter is a sympathetic writer and one with a keen eye and ear for the absurd. There are sentences on almost every page which raise a smile. I like the painter who remains “on the cusp of being fairly well known”, a phrase he puts into every description of his work, knowing that the gallery will remove it and replace it with something like, “his work explores ideas of individuality within a societal context” or some such value-adding blah.” Or: “I’d never felt more like a husband than I did that night. A husband isn’t a man, not in the way that a warrior’s a man or a caveman’s a man”.

The temptation for the author of a comic novel is to put something in simply because he thinks it funny. It’s a danger that for the most part Canter avoids. Kingsley Amis advised that a joke or witty line in a novel should always be more than that: it should advance the plot or illuminate a character. That way, even if the joke misfires or the reader doesn’t find it funny, he has still got something from it.

Canter follows this practice. His comic lines are always related to character or perception of character. Near the end, for example, Richard decides not to take his clothes off because he would only have to put them on again when the baby woke up, and he remarks that he was dressed in a vest and boxer shorts, like a character in an American sitcom, who can’t go to bed naked because of the advertisers. This works as a joke because it is in character for Richard to think this.

Worth is perhaps not as funny as Canter‘s last novel, A Short Gentleman, partly because he is trying something more ambitious; writing comedy about people who are not reduced to being types, but are as complicated and ultimately unknowable as those we meet in real life.

On the whole it works, and there are so few novelists writing comedy today that one must be grateful to anyone attempting the difficult art of the comic novel. It’s far easier to write about gloom, depression, despair and madness.