Something New

 

 

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

“WINTER TIME” by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin, $NZ 36); “EDITH AND KIM” by Charlotte Philby ( The Borough Press / HarperCollins, $NZ32:99)

 

            Laurence Fearnley’s latest novel Winter Time is the most compelling narrative she has yet written and the one that every reader will want to read to the very end. I say this up front because, frankly, I have had mixed feelings about some of her previous novels. In newspapers I reviewed her earlier novels Room, Edwin and Matilda and Mother’s Day. On this blog, you can find my reviews of her The Hut Builder (published 2010) ; Reach (2014); and The Quiet Spectacular (2016). To quote from my review of The Quiet Spectacular: “Despite their many merits, I did note the awful weight of overt symbolism and rather arch patterning in Reach; and the tendency to preach in The Hut Builder. These tendencies run amuck in the over-patterned, over-symbolic and over-preachy The Quiet Spectacular, to the point where the characters become mere ciphers and walking ideas.” Winter Time does not have any of these faults. Partly a whodunnit, or at least something very close to a whodunnit, its story is relatively straightforward. And if Fearnley has any message to preach to us, it is implicit and built into the characters, rather than spelled out polemically.

            Roland is the eldest in what was a very unhappy family. None of his siblings married or had children. His youngest brother Isaac was killed in an accident years ago, his sister Casey is long gone, and now his other brother Eddie has died in a crash. Eddie’s ute veered off the road and landed him in a canal where he drowned, unable to fight his way out of the vehicle. Roland is very different from Eddie. Eddie was a sturdy outdoors bloke, a deer culler working for the conservation people. Roland is gay. He has deserted the old family home in the South Island and moved to Sydney where he and his gay partner run a health food business. But Roland loved Eddie and remembers him fondly as the guy who looked after him when they were kids. Even though Roland was the older one, Eddie shielded him from the rages of their father Gerard, who eventually walked out on the family. Eddie didn’t try to test Roland’s manliness with outdoor tasks the way their father did. And Eddie was appreciative of Roland’s indoor skills, especially his culinary arts.

            So Roland flies from Sydney to his original home town for his brother’s funeral. (The town is given the fictitious name Matariki, but will easily be recognised by some readers as what has rapidly become a tourist town in the Mackenzie Basin.) As soon as Roland looks at the site where Eddie swerved off the road, he senses that something is amiss. He suspects foul play of some sort, and the main thread of the novel has him trying to find out all he can about his brother’s death. In this search, he is helped by a sympathetic woman called Bay whom he meets in the local café and who says she knew Eddie. There is a major snag in Roland’s search for the truth however. Somebody has been able to steal Roland’s on-line identity, and is posting deliberately inflammatory messages under Roland’s name. They are designed to stir up anger between trophy hunters who want to shoot deer and tahr for sport, and cullers who are there to thin out these animals in the interest of conservation.   

As always, I do not give away too much plot when dealing with a novel that has an element of mystery. The author has a right to expect her twists of plot not to be revealed. Enough to note that Laurence Fearnley throws a number of mis-directions at us and comes to a plausible conclusion about the guilty party.

There are many skills in this novel.

Fearnley weaves the backstory of Roland’s family seamlessly into Roland’s search for answers.

She is very good at noting how this South Island town has changed over the years. Roland’s childhood memories of an unpretentious little town are matched with the town’s current commercialisation and the flashy holiday homes than are build there for the very wealthy, locking out less affluent people.

In the person of Roland’s next-door neighbour, Mrs Linden, she creates a character so grotesque as to be funny, yet at the same time disgusting and almost sinister.

The relationship of Roland and his partner Leon is handled very delicately, but not idealised. Leon, the older man, is a pragmatist, wanting their health food business to expand even if it means compromising their standards. He is an entrepreneur first. Roland is more the idealist and the dreamer, wanting to stick with their original programme and not very good at the business side of things. There are mild ruptures in their relationship. They realise they are getting older and no longer feel the intense first buzz of love, yet Leon is clearly annoyed when Roland leaves him on his trips to New Zealand. He has a strong strain of possessiveness.  Fearnley has moved far beyond the sort of advocacy books we used to read about gay men, who were depicted as flawless so that we could more easily feel for them. Here she has created a credible but far from perfect pair whom we can still like.

Her greatest skill, though, is setting her story in a harsh South Island winter, which she depicts with careful and close observation. Fearnley has much expertise when it comes to mountains and the outdoors (remember she co-edited an anthology about New Zealand mountains, and helped write a mountaineering friend’s autobiography). It shows here as she charts the seasons changing, the snow, the semi-thaw, the way plants behave in the cold and the inconveniences for walkers and other travellers. The chilliest images in Winter Time are of Roland alone in the family home, with the cold biting at him. A perfect image for a man who is lonely, worried in his heart and stumped in his enquiry.

Others may make a different judgement, but this is for me Fearnley’s most relatable novel.

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            I admit that I requested a review copy of Charlotte Philby’s Edith and Kim under a misapprehension. Charlotte Philby is the grand-daughter of the Soviet spy Kim Philby. Seeing her name on the cover of Edith and Kim I assumed, wrongly, that this was going to be a work of non-fiction, a grand-daughter’s memoir or non-fiction account of her grandfather and his circle. I was wrong. Edith and Kim is a novel – based on fact but a novel nevertheless. Charlotte Philby, journalist, columnist and author of three previous novels, says clearly in her opening author’s note that this is “a work of fiction based on  facts as I have variously found them, reimagining the lives of two people from starkly different backgrounds.” She further notes that some characters are invented. Some of Kim Philby’s letters are reproduced, but the author says she has made some of them up.

All of which puts me very much on my guard. Checking this novel against various books I have on Kim Philby and Edith Suschitsky (often known by her married name Edith Tudor-Hart) and their espionage activities, I find that this novel sticks very much to the historical record – but of course the thoughts, feelings and attitudes of Edith, who dominates the novel, are very much the author’s invention. And the author’s interpretation of events is hers too.

Viennese-born Edith Suschitsky was the daughter of a Social-Democrat bookseller and in the 1920s and early 1930s, she was much interested in the German Bauhaus movement. Embracing modern art in all its forms, she took up photography. But being Jewish, she and her family were very wary of the antisemitic-inflected Austrian version of Fascism that was on the rise and was soon to take over Austria. Like many others of her generation, Edith thought that Communism would be a bulwark against Fascism and she joined the Communist Party, becoming a courier between Austria and England.

It was in Austria that she met public-school-and-Cambridge educated Kim Philby, son of a very pukka British imperialist, who hadn’t yet committed himself to Communism. Back in London, Edith introduced Kim to Soviet agent Arnold Deutsch, who checked Philby out and then recruited him for the party. As is well-known, Philby then spent most of the 1930s building up a deep cover for himself by loudly supporting right-wing causes. He was a Times correspondent in the Spanish Civil War, covering the Franco side and writing enthusiastic dispatches on Franco. He joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, which was essentially a Nazi-controlled front seeking approval for Nazi Germany’s re-armament. Diligently playing the role of a Tory patriot, he seemed just the sort of chap that England’s secret service would approve, and by the early 1940s the Soviet spy was embedded in MI5.

While all this was going on, Edith Suschitsky had settled in London, set herself up as a professional photographer, and married the English doctor Alexander Tudor-Hart. Because she was seen at a Communist rally in London, she was observed by MI5 and was known to mix with Communists – but although she was investigated a number of times, she was never caught out in spying and was never prosecuted for anything. The only time she was jailed had been in Vienna when she was incarcerated for a few months before leaving Vienna for good.

Once all this is settled, the novel concentrates on Edith. Kim Philby is never really seen in close-up – except in the letters he wrote to Edith from the 1960s on, when he had been exposed and had fled to Russia. Edith and Kim has three forms of narration. There is the third-person account of Edith’s life over the years – very intimate and detailed, taking up most of the novel. There are  reproductions of authentic MI5 documents (retrieved by Charlotte Philby from the archives) tracing Edith’s movements in formal language – and sometimes redacted so that some people’s names aren’t mentioned. And there are those 1960s-on letters from Kim. It is interesting how much the exposed spy talks about trivia like the weather, and makes a few comments on old friends back in the day – but of course never says anything about his spying activities.

And how does Edith’s life play out in this novel? Fairly drab and pedestrian, to put it simply. She gets a little upset when Stalin makes his pact with Hitler in 1939, but unlike many others, she still sticks with the party. Her marriage disintegrates and she has two or three lovers, but she gets angry with one who questions the righteousness of the Communist cause. When Hitler double-crosses his pal Stalin and invades Russia in 1941, she is heartened to see Communism again fighting Fascism. And for the first time she really does do some spying, getting documents related to Britain’s atomic research (passed to her by the likes of Nunn-May and the friends of Klaus Fuchs), photographing them and handing them over to Soviet agents. By 1956, she is upset by Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, but she still believes in her chosen ideology.

Yet while all this is going on, she is most concerned with her young son Tommy, who is mentally impaired and whom she takes to various doctors and psychiatrists (including Anna Freud) for treatment. Edith would like to believe that the only cause of Tommy’s impairment is trauma caused by living through the Blitz. In fact, he was mentally much more deeply afflicted than that and had to spend the rest of his life in psychiatric hospitals. [One source I read said that Tommy was schizophrenic, but that term is not used in this novel]. Edith’s aching for Tommy’s recovery almost resembles her aching for all Communism’s promises to be fulfilled. At least, that’s the way I read it, even if it wasn’t the author’s intentions.

This is a very earnest novel, and as novels-based-on-fact go it is true to the record. By focusing on somebody who was really a very minor player in the Cold War, Charlotte Philby is making clear to us how unglamorous spying usually is, peopled by unhappy people playing small roles at the bidding of manipulative masters. In the end, all I was left with was a sense of desolation to think of all those people of goodwill who, unknowingly, harnessed themselves to the cause of a totalitarian and genocidal state.