Snow, Ever After and Still Life

 

For a detective murder investigation, this is very well written as befits a Booker prizewinning author. There is some great dialogue which is fortunate as this is mainly a series of interviews by Detective Inspector St John Strafford. The best of these was with Lettie (short for Lettuce), an awful teenager expelled from some expensive boarding school. Nearly as good was when Strafford has to go to see the Archbishop.

The dead man is father Tom and we are given a huge clue early on as to the motive. However, this is strangely never really mentioned until much later. About three quarters through, the book goes back ten years, with a change of tense from third to first person. This individual takes us into their confidence, an amazing nearly twenty pages with sentences such as one from an old priest "that's what God is there for, to forgive us our sins".

However I felt the ending was predictable and the story turned out to be highly unsavoury. I have never read anything like it before and have no wish to do so again. That is despite the literary merit.

Our 52 year old narrator is in a mess. In such a mess that he messes up his own suicide. Why, when he has inherited great wealth from his stepfather that gave him a fellowship at one of the best universities. Graham Swift has made his narrator fiercely erudite (I'm beginning to sound like him) as he joins those elderly (if not ancient) dons: "A few dubiously nimble brains, in a few desiccated, enfeebled bodies". Swift's introduction in the first few pages is one of the best I have ever read.

So here he sits in the college garden, ruminating on what brought him here. "The gardeners giving him a wide, respectful birth". He has emerged from hospital "a fully reconditioned if fragile specimen". He is "a refugee from show-business and grief". I do think that the story of his marriage to his actress wife Ruth is the bast part of the book. Less so, the study of the notebooks of Mathew Pearce from 1854. Much less so.

Can I just sling in some of the vocabulary that is new to me? "my paradisaical surroundings" - "the auguries of happy-ever-afters" - "my stepfathers maledictions" - "Sam's annunciatory visit" - "purlieus of knowledge". And a note about Darwin: "I have dipped into Darwin. It's heavy going. The prose thick, grey and formidable, like porridge".

Our narrator (we don't learn his name until page 173) tells us about his childhood and his exotic mother. "But the past they say is a foreign country, and I fictionalise (perhaps) these memories". Then "It was my mother who first warned me ..... against the ruinous desire to outwit mortality". So this is quite a philosophical book, punctuated by events with those close to him. I preferred the latter. And we are left with the question from my first sentences ... why?

This is such an emotional book, full of witty brilliant dialogue. All the characters are wonderful, I especially loved Pete, the pub's piano player. "He could have gone to the Royal Academy, everyone knew that. He moved seamlessly onto Wagner, a sure sign the evening was turning bitter". Ulysses Temper is the main character and the elderly duo Cress and Evelyn Skinner are magical.

But it was Alys (or kid as she is called at first) that I found irresistible as she was born only a few months younger than me in 1944, the year the book starts. Alys grows up, well so does everyone else, as the location alternates between London and Florence. When the poet Constance Everly appears I really thought she was a real person. A great story, written with style and panache. I could not stop reading to make notes, it was that good.