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A LONG WALK IN WINTERTIME

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It is often said that the quintessential English novel is about adultery in Hampstead. I have never, in fact, read a novel which has this precise combination of geographical location and subject-matter, but "A Long Walk in Wintertime", which is about adultery and is set in the neighbouring North London district of Camden, comes close. Daniel McDonald, a lecturer in philosophy at London University, has a brief affair with Lisha, a nineteen-year-old student. Daniel hopes to keep the affair secret, but when Lisha's parents learn that their daughter has had an abortion they write to the University authorities to complain about his behaviour. Faced with losing his job, Daniel is forced to confess to his wife Alice. He resigns from his position and takes a new job at the University of East Anglia, leaving the family home in London to live in lodgings in Norwich.

Unlike many studies of adultery, the book concentrates less on the adulterous affair itself than on the effect that it has on Daniel's family; the relationship is already over when the story opens, and Lisha only plays a minor part in the ensuing developments. Alice, who has lost her own job at around the same time, is left wondering whether she can forgive her husband. The person who seems to have been most deeply affected, however, is their twelve-year old son, Jamie. Already unhappy at his comprehensive school where he is doing badly, Jamie is upset by the separation between his parents and goes missing while on a train journey to visit his father. Most of the rest of the book is concerned with Alice's search for him in the bleak Norfolk countryside.

Perhaps unusually for a novel of the nineties, there is a strongly Christian (often specifically Catholic) atmosphere. One of the most important characters is Daniel's godmother Violet, a devout Catholic, and there is a sub-plot involving Violet's friendship with Geoffrey, a retired Army officer, with whom as a young woman she had a wartime affair despite the fact that he was married at the time. The themes of forgiveness, of making amends for past wrongs, particularly sexual wrongdoing, and of reconciliation are present throughout. In the book's opening scene, Alice and Daniel visit the opera; it is significant that the work they choose to see, Verdi's "Stiffelio", is about a husband who forgives his unfaithful wife. There is an attempt to contrast Catholic and Protestant attitudes to forgiveness; in Ms Purves's thesis, Catholicism places more stress upon release from guilt through confession, whereas Protestantism, at least in its evangelical form, is more concerned with making amends for the harm one has caused. It must be said that the plot itself does not always support this analysis; the Catholic Violet, for example, finds it difficult to forgive herself for her past sins, despite presumably having confessed them and received absolution.

The novel is critical of certain aspects of modern British society, particularly the education of the young. Although Jamie is not academically gifted, he has strong artistic talents which his school has failed to recognise. (There is a contrast with his older and more confident sister Clementine, who attends an independent boarding school which is able to nurture both her academic and her sporting talents). During his wanderings in Norfolk, Jamie comes across a traditional steam-driven travelling funfair and, through a misunderstanding, is allowed to help with the task of repainting the horses on the merry-go-round, a task which enables him to make use of his artistic and creative gifts. It seemed to me that Ms Purves was challenging the British state school system to abandon its central ideal of a grammar-school academic education for every child and to do what many independent schools have done, namely to acknowledge that some children's talents lie in different directions. The funfair also acts as a symbol of an idealised past, a past where children's entertainment was more innocent than it is today. The innocent thrills of the funfair are contrasted with modern computer games, obsessed with violence and death. Jamie has been playing truant from school in order to take part in a war game called "Battlezone", which involves the use of laser guns to kill imaginary enemies.

Although her view of the past seems a rather conservative one, Ms Purves tries to take the standard politically correct liberal line on matters such as feminism and homosexuality. I say "tries to take" because she is not always convincing in these areas. One of the weaknesses of the book is the way in which the minor characters are often seen in stereotypical terms. We might conclude, for example, from Alice's gay friends Simon and Stevie that gays are warm-hearted, spontaneous, creative, artistic and sensitive but also over-emotional, effeminate and (in Simon's case) wildly promiscuous. Quite. To complete this seventies sitcom picture, they even address people by such terms of endearment as "sweetie" or "ducky". (Ducky? I thought that one died with the Carry On films). Alice's other close friends are a snobbish, upwardly-mobile couple and Yasmin, a ruthless and embittered career woman with no time for serous relationships or family life. Yasmin comes across as so unpleasant that I was surprised that she was the best friend of anyone, let alone of a woman as different from her as the artistic, bohemian Alice.

The title "A Long Walk in Wintertime" is perhaps misleading, for two reasons. First, the action actually takes place in autumn rather than winter. More importantly, the title tends to suggest a book that is both leisurely and sombre, but in fact the narrative moves at a brisk pace, and the tone, particularly of the ending, is optimistic. Despite its weaknesses, this is an interesting, if unfashionable, attempt to analyse modern family life in Christian terms.