We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“THE OPEN WORLD” by
Stephanie Johnson (Vintage/Random House, $NZ 37:99)
A little under halfway
through Stephanie Johnson’s latest novel The
Open World, the main character Elizabeth Smith declares:
“If anyone would ask me the dimensions of my faith, I would say the
truest aspect of God is that He shares His gender with the inhabitants of the
open world, and His affections run hot and cold. Sometimes He is with me, more
often not, and there is little recourse but to love Him at either distance….”
(pg.137)
I’m not quite sure what
this statement means, but the part about God sharing His gender seems to be a
kind of sexually-aware version of the idea that God is love. God, it implies,
is also involved in sexual love. And as the novelist has chosen the phrase “the
open world” for her title, it’s obviously a passage on which we’re meant to
focus. Here is a conjunction of religion and sex. The “open” world is
presumably the opposite of a “closed” world in which things, including sexual
matters, are kept hidden. The “open world” could also refer to the the wide
world – the whole globe - as opposed to
the confines of one country like Britain. And in this novel characters do
sometimes have a sense of wonder at the size of the world and the fact that
they have reached the antipodes, so far from their little English home.
Elizabeth Smith (based,
says an author’s note, on Stephanie
Johnson’s great-great-great grandmother) is a nineteenth century woman with a
difficult and potentially scandalous sexual past. (The cover design – a woman
wearing a bright scarlet crinoline – seems intended to suggest the phrase
“scarlet woman”.) At the same time she does have a relationship with God and is
attempting to live a life of respectability.
Widowed, and already in
early middle age, she comes to New Zealand in the 1840s as companion and nurse
to Mary Ann Martin, wife of Judge
Martin. On the three-month voyage from England, they travel with Bishop Selwyn,
the first Anglican Bishop of New Zealand, and his shrewish and reproving wife
Julia. Later Elizabeth has a hand in running the Native Hospital at Taurarua,
which is now called Judge’s Bay (after Judge Martin) in Auckland. She also
visits some Anglican mission stations further south.
This voyage, and
Elizabeth’s first encounters and first years in New Zealand, are recalled in
the first-person by Elizabeth herself, years later, when she is getting old and
infirm and living in London in the 1860s. But alternate chapters, written in
the third-person, recount her life in 1860s London. Here she catches up with
old acquaintances, including Selwyn (now Bishop of Lichfield) and the eccentric
clergyman William Cotton, a manic-depressive temporarily incarcerated in a
madhouse, and called “Bee” by his friends because of his old hobby of
bee-keeping. Elizabeth also meets people more intimately related to her, such
as the daughter (by another woman) of a man who once impregnated her.
In both the 1840s
sections and the 1860s sections there are hints at, suggestions of, and probings into Elizabeth’s scandalous
past, about which curious people sometimes ask her pointed questions. She
herself, in her first-person confessional sections, can be evasive. Who was the
father of her two boys? Was she marred twice or once? Was the first man who
impregnated her a lover but not a husband? Did she also have an affair with a
Maori in New Zealand? If there is a narrative thread to this character study,
it is the slow answering of questions such as these.
It would be quite wrong
of me to suggest the novel is sex-obsessed, but there is a fairly constant
interest in sex. The early-twenty-first-century novelist does toss off phrases
that would have offended the propriety of a Victorian novelist. But then that’s
part of the point, isn’t it? We’re exposing the “worm in the bud” concealed
beneath dark trousers and crinolines. We are interrogating colonial Victorian
sexual mores.
So, as Elizabeth passes
through Australia, she can’t help noticing a kangaroo at self-play: “At first I thought the narrow protusion was
part of his marsupial pouch – but it was his organ, a tufted tumescence he
palpitated enthusiastically with his paws.” (pg.94)
So she notices the timid
virginity and the neurotic vapours of
sex-starved Mary Ann Martin, whose marriage was unconsummated at the
time her husband the judge left for New Zealand.
So – above all – she
makes sardonic comments about Bishop Selwyn and his wife. “I saw at a glance that for all his enthusiastic religion he [Bishop
Selwyn] was a man who could not regard a
woman in bed without a certain quickening of the pulse….” she says. And a
few paragraphs later: “Hours later, while
I plied a sleepless needle to the swaying lamp, out of the dark came the music
of matrimonial faddling, Sarah emitting a series of high-pitched mews, while
the young Bishop performed a froglike bass.” (pgs. 48-49)
Elizabeth’s
“unconventionality” – at least in terms of respectable Victorian society – is
also signalled by the occasional use she makes of alcohol and drug concoctions.
For this she is at one point rebuked by Bishop Selwyn, when a ship-board party
at which she presides becomes too wild and lusty.
There are other
historical matters in which both novelist and sometime narrator are willing to
make judgments. One of them is the class thing, with a patronising Bishop
Selwyn sometimes attempting to put Elizabeth in her place and remind her she is
of the lower orders. Elizabeth strongly suggests that such class business are
things of which New Zealand should gradually rid itself. One thing she deplores
when she returns to England is the rigidity of the English class system, so
different from what is developing in the colony. There are side issues about
religious controversies and types of
Anglicanism (Selwyn’s High Church finery contrasted with blunter Evangelicals).
And, thinking of the New Zealand Wars going on in the 1860s, old Elizabeth
passes another negative judgment on the bishop: “For many years Selwyn was openly critical of the vast tracts of land
tricked out of the Maori people by the missionaries and the hordes that
followed them…. but in the end he sided with his own. So much of what was
happening was his fault.” (pg. 105)
Almost inevitably, there
is also an expression of that sense of colonial cultural dislocation. Says
Elizabeth: “It is part of life in New
Zealand to feel justly at home – of good use and well regarded – and wrongly in
residence all at the same time; on so many levels it makes the head and the
heart ache. Europeans – they call us Pakeha, or Tuaiwi, which means stranger –
must not allow the dichotomy to overwhelm them.. Otherwise… what? We must all
board the ships and sail away to whence we came?” (pg.122).
How do I judge this as
an historical novel? I am happy to note that Stephanie Johnson only very
occasionally indulges in the type of easy retrospective irony that bedevils
less subtle historical novels. One conversation includes the following:
“ ‘New Zealand was never like that, Miss Tripp. You are confusing us
with Australia,’ says the Bishop.
‘I do believe it will be an eternal confusion.’ [says the Bishop’s wife] ‘It
will become part of our nation’s character to be forever distinguishing itself
from the neighbour’ ” (pgs. 194-95).
Mercifully, there’s not
too much of that sort of thing.
Johnson also creates
dialogue (and interior monologue) that at least sounds plausibly Victorian, with only the very rare slip-up. ( Of
things that appear in this novel, I doubt if Victorians would ever have used
the terms “judgmental” or “mind-altering”; and they certainly would
not have said “My feelings are conflicted.”)
This is, in short, the
work of an intelligent and sometimes witty author who is trying to feel her way
into another age.
Yet, with the deepest of
regret, I found The Open World
clogged and confused. It is not merely a matter of the unnecessary alternate
narrative voices (and a few others besides), but of the novel’s lengthy
denouement, where we appear to linger with the old woman in London long after
her situation has been made clear to us and the dark corners of her life have
all been illuminated. I have the abiding sense of a big build-up to a feeble
outcome. Perhaps a politer way to put this would be to say that I savoured this
novel more for its individual episodes than for its overall structure. For all
the novel’s incidental interests, Elizabeth Smith’s past is simply not a strong
enough narrative thread upon which to hang a coherent story. The details of
period time place and society are interesting, but this painting has no central
focus.
Given that she was
(loosely) basing it on an ancestor, was Stephanie Johnson in fact constrained
by the historical record and unable to somehow open it out?
thoughtful review
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