Customer Reviews

Jumping the Queue (G.K. Hall Audio Books Series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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The marvelous Mary Wesley passed away a few weeks ago. She was 90. She did not begin publishing until she reached her 70's. She wrote witty social comedy with depth and tenderness and could spin a wicked plot. This was her first novel. I had the pleasure of discovering her when Arts & Entertainment, a TV station, broadcast "Harnessing Peacocks," which was my favorite of her novels. I binged on her work in the 90's, reading one after another. Now that she's gone, I shall reread them all.

Jumping the Queue is an unusually crafted story that begins with Matilda Poliport's attempt to end her life thwarted by timing, a non-event which sets the tone for the whole tale. Mary Wesley describes Matilda's environs with exquisite word pictures: her cottage, her neighbors, town. When matricide Hugh Warner stumbles into Matilda's life, things take an interesting turn, and they keep turning that way till the end. Jumping the Queue is an extraordinary story whose ending surprised me, and I'm hard to fool.

I read this about ten years ago and loved it. It's funny in a mad way all the way through (or at least that's how I remember it) except for the ending which really did upset me - in a forgiving kind of way.

Easy read, great plot and highly recommended.

Jumping the Queue is a British expression meaning to commit suicide, to push to the head of the line for Death. Wesley's heroine Matilda is in her early fifties and as the book opens she is in the process of tidying herself out of life: cleaning the house, disposing of her pet gander, and ensuring that her four children will find very little evidence of her inner and outer existence. She has planned a final picnic that will culminate in a handful of tablets washed down with Beaujolais, followed by a swim towards the tide that will carry her off.

But her plans are spoiled, first by the unexpected presence on the beach of a group of young people and then, later, by a chance encounter with a man on the run from the police - a Matricide. Wesley brings the two characters together and they begin a dance of mutual and self exploration. As with the best mystery novels, nothing is quite what it seems. Wesley has a talent for pithy dialog, concise description, and amusing juxtapositions. Most of all she has an all-inclusive view of how life can unfold in the interstices and how even the most odd things can be accepted and integrated into one's daily routine, though not without cost.

Matilda is a resourceful woman who has lived her entire life with the mental trick of forgetting, or at least pushing into the furthest recesses of her mind, inconvenient truths. As she approaches death - only temporarily thwarted by her attachment to the Matricide Hugh Warner - she rediscovers the hidden and buried parts of her life. Yet though this could be a bitter book it is in fact surprisingly life-affirming. As she talks about her discovery of her husband's infidelity with their daughter, Matilda also acknowledges that she enjoyed the opportunity to experience at second-hand the new sexual techniques her husband was being taught in the course of the affair. Much as Dickens or Shakespeare can paint characters with dubious back-stories who nevertheless gain our sympathy and often respect, so Wesley leads us to admire Matilda even as we come to understand the price she has paid for her strategy of wilfull forgetfulness.

In the end, of course, things fall away and Matilda, alone at the end, consumates her suicide as originally planned. And the mastery of Wesley's writing is such that we feel both saddened by and accepting of her final decision. For anyone who enjoys contemporary (or nearly so, given that the book was originally written over two decades ago) literature, this little book is a brief yet lasting pleasure and is far better than the novels Wesley went on to write, which sadly ended up being popular at the expense of being interesting.