Already a subscriber? Log in
Not all, though, is well-manicured politesse, because Juliet, Gibbons’s chain-smoking and obstreperous heroine, hails from a council estate and talks panto-style London demotic. A self-taught scientific genius, enticed by her ageing benefactress Miss Adelaide Pennecuick into taking up residence in a large and suspiciously well-staffed house in Hertfordshire, ‘Julie’ awakens all kinds of alarm in the breasts of Miss Pennecuick’s entourage, not least her fast friend Mrs Massey, who worries that a proposal by ‘Addy’s great-nephew Frank will cut out her grand-daughter Clemence’. Then, of course, there is the question of where the money will end up.
If all this sounds like the plot of a Victorian novel transported into the modern age, or something more or less approximating it, then the resemblance becomes even more emphatic in the chapters following Miss Pennecuick’s death. Here Frank, her chief legatee, does the decent thing by Clemence, sires a house full of children, hands Hightower over to an ecology movement whose ideals he supports, sends Juliet to Cambridge and then watches fondly as she settles down
in the house next door to work on her ground-breaking enquiry into the idea of coincidence.
As to the exact nature of Juliet’s studies, all we really learn is that she is considered to be a modern Kepler or Wittgenstein, while burning to devise a benchmark for the workings of chance that will resemble ‘the second law of thermodynamics’. Though successful at Cambridge, she is thought ‘obsessive’, and it is not until her late thirties, after long years of self-sequestration, that she finally breaks cover with a document entitled ‘The Law of Coincidence: Some Investigations and a Conclusion’, wins a prestigious award funded by a
Gulf State emirate and is whisked off to the ‘University of Qu’aid’ to receive it in the company of Frank and his admiring family.
Even by this late stage the junior Pennecuicks are still telling each other to ‘pipe down’. Further evidence of the novel’s almost complete detachment from the locales it purports to describe can be found in the chapter about Juliet’s education, which suggests that you get into Cambridge by passing examinations in a variety of different subjects (all apparently sat on the same day) and travel there from Hertfordshire by way of Norwich. None of this is without a certain amount of sly charm, or indeed pathos (see, in particular, what happens to Juliet), but the ‘classic’ status now bestowed on this period curio is as questionable as the wedding-bound Mrs Massey’s taste in hats.
Because you read about book review
Also by D. J. Taylor
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in