God on the Rocks

For fans of Jane Gardam’s Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat, God on the Rocks, a 1978 Booker Prize finalist, will satisfy. As Gardam wrote in the November 20, 2010 Op-Ed article “Richard’s Glove, Kate’s Hand” (which gives an historical perspective to Kate and Prince William’s upcoming wedding), “In my novels I write about the ‘old world,’ my parents’ world, where people wore hats—and gloves.” But “the old world is not so far away from this one.” Therefore, this novel, set along the northern English coast in 1938, between the world wars, is not chronological but jumps back and forth between different characters’ perspectives and pasts. In a book both humorous and tragic, the reader has to read carefully to notice switches in perspective and Gardam’s parceling out of information during the unfolding of fully defined lives.

For fans of Jane Gardam’s Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat, God on the Rocks, a 1978 Booker Prize finalist, will satisfy. As Gardam wrote in the November 20, 2010 Op-Ed article “Richard’s Glove, Kate’s Hand” (which gives an historical perspective to Kate and Prince William’s upcoming wedding), “In my novels I write about the ‘old world,’ my parents’ world, where people wore hats—and gloves.” But “the old world is not so far away from this one.” Therefore, this novel, set along the northern English coast in 1938, between the world wars, is not chronological but jumps back and forth between different characters’ perspectives and pasts. In a book both humorous and tragic, the reader has to read carefully to notice switches in perspective and Gardam’s parceling out of information during the unfolding of fully defined lives.

The novel is more character than plot driven, although there is suspense at the very end. It does have a theme of craziness both hidden and real. And the progression comes with discoveries about the characters. First we learn about the main character, eight-year-old Margaret Marsh’s family: an unhappy romantic mother Ellie, a religious fundamentalist (member of the Primal Saints) father Kenneth, and a bawdy nurse Lydia. Margaret, confused about sex, is disturbed about what she sees. She announces to her mother about this crazy world, “It would be better without people. If I’d been God, I’d have left it at dinosaurs.” One humorous scene of the father involves his trying to convert beachgoers—to the point of falling into the water and ruining his shoes and clothes.

A second revelation comes with Margaret stumbling upon craziness for real in a crumbling estate where she encounters a “gaga” painter whose canvas supposedly of the building is instead full of snakes. This Hall’s history with its dying owner Rosalie Frayling Margaret never learns, though she meets her mother’s friends Binkie and Charles Frayling. What she does detect is the love between Charles and Ellie from when they were children. Binkie keeps the sibling household together but to the point of craziness: “Nobody knows, she thought, what it costs to live the life I live. The ordered life. She endured it because it kept her so busy that she need not think. If she stopped for a moment to think, then the game would be up. Chaos would take charge. The sea would rush in and give up its dead.”

The sea does rush in towards the end after the chaos of affections comes out. And while this is a tale of lost loves, including Rosalie Frayling’s, the ending is uplifting, partly because children’s perspective prevails, this time two boys.’ In the final revelations, the reader must figure out who these boys are and also who Beezer, a shell-shocked captain, is. The boys are told about his failed rescue attempt off their beach. They are told Beezer, the lifeboatman, was “gassed” (which of course meant during the war), but one boy asks, “Gassed! On the lifeboat?” And finally the indomitable spirit Lydia, who exposes Kenneth’s hypocrisy, returns. When asked if she ever married, Lydia responds, “’Nivver. I’se not that daft.” And then pointing to the seabirds, adds, “’In’t they bonny?” Not only does Margaret acknowledge lovingly that Lydia hasn’t changed, but the reader realizes that everyone has stayed true to his or her nature, including Margaret’s mother who continues to try too hard in everything she does. We know these characters well and we love them.