Book review: Meeting the English by Kate Clanchy

For her first full-length novel, the poet and short story writer Kate Clanchy has gone back to the stifling summer of 1989 to tell the story of fading literary lion Phillip Prys, wheelchair-bound after a stroke, and the family fallout resulting from his wife’s decision to hire seventeen-year-old Struan Robertson, fresh from sitting his Higher exams in Scotland’s Central Belt, to nurse the ailing writer. What follows broadens the experience of all the characters as they negotiate their way through a long, sultry season which alters more than a few lives along the way.

Although the title might suggest that Struan, as the interloper, has most to learn from all this, Clanchy is careful to present things from various viewpoints; we see how strange London appears to the boy from Cuik, but we also experience the trials of Phillip’s daughter, Juliet, the tribulations of his gloriously Welsh ex-wife, Myfanwy and, most touchingly, the muddled and frustrated feelings of the incapacitated writer himself, reduced to communicating with winks and blinks while his extended family plots and cavorts around him. Other players in the piece include Shirin, an Iranian artist and Phillip’s young third wife, Giles the literary agent and Jake, Phillip’s son. Very loosely following the framework of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the action takes place not on a bank where the wild thyme grows but rather on and around Hampstead Heath, in particular the public bathing pools.

Struan may be innocent in the ways of London, but he has great wisdom and emotional intelligence and, having spent the past two years nursing his dying father, he is able to offer Phillip the care and understanding which his family, perhaps too close and too caught up in their own complications, are unable to show. He and Juliet circle each other, threatening to develop a relationship but failing to progress beyond friendship; Struan falls in love with Shirin but thinks that she is in thrall to Jake, while Myfanwy seems in love with the property market and spends much time regretting the loss of her youth. Things are complicated further by the arrival of Ron Fox, Struan’s teacher, who immediately falls for Juliet and eventually wins her over by his skill at imitating baby elephants.

All of this makes the book sound comic, which to some extent it is. Like the play on which it is modelled, it is a romantic comedy in which affections swing this way and that but, in the character of Phillip Prys, it also has something of a tragic hero. Trapped in his incapacitated body, he struggles to make sense of the events going on around him, settling on seeing it all as a play or a film of his own devising, an attempt to win back his lost popularity. He is haunted by the shadow of Myfanwy, threatening to turn his library into a dining kitchen (“I shall have the shelves chopped into bread boards and sell the books for pulp”), and he lives in fear of her finishing him off with a pillow.

In the end the characters all find either redemption (Jake is able to communicate properly with his father for the first time), reward (Struan, Juliet and Mr Fox all find true love) or release (once these revels are ended, Phillip has truly “’scaped the serpent’s tongue,” albeit rather tragically). Clanchy’s poetic use of language is a joy, and this book will provoke tears of sadness and joy in equal measure.

By Mike Sansbury, of The Grove Bookshop, Ilkley