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The Long View

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Elizabeth Jane Howard's career as a novelist has been long and distinguished. Her autobiography is due to be published in 2002. "The Long View" is one of her early novels, dating from 1956.

The author adopts an unusual construction for her narrative. It might be called chronology in reverse. Instead of tracing the development of a relationship between husband and wife over a period of twenty-four years, Miss Howard begins in the present and reverts, stage by stage, to the time of the first meeting.

No novelist known to me is as skilled as Miss Howard at dissecting and displaying the myriad flickerings and quiverings of people's thought and emotions in dialogue with themselves and in interaction with each other. Admiration of this skill is more likely to command your attention in this book than are the appeals of suspense, plot development and setting.

In five parts, going from 1950-1926, "The Long View" propels its reader backwards in the life of its protagonist. By unlayering five separate years, inspecting the acute social habits of English middle-class life, Howard discovers the events and personalities that form Antonia Fleming's destiny. Exceptional accomplishment here is the use of total narrative reverse to effect a compelling, onward flow. Disconnected time sections shift from Antonia's mature to early womanhood. As with any archaeological survey, only by arriving at the last passage can you reconstruct Antonia in full. Throughout, a sound of voices brilliantly veins the novel. Eavesdropping, the reader attends. Listens to Antonia, who thinks, aloud or in reflection. Meanwhile, surrounding characters reveal themselves - in recalled, internal, and spoken dialogue. And we find their perfected self-absorption leaves small heart room for others. At Part I, the final chronological section, Howard underlines the cumulative effect of this on the protagonist by subtacting her given name. Here narrative and dialogue refer to "she" or "Mrs. Fleming." It is during this part of her life that she learns to dine alone: "My life, she thought, and sat down to it. With this apparent end, the larger story begins. The remaining four parts excavate Mrs. Fleming's life, the consistently poignant details of its unrewarded hope and emotional solitude. With no formal education, put forward by none, Antonia possesses unsophisticated passions, honesty, and kindness. These will always be of some use, to someone. Conrad Fleming weds her both for a "hint" of beauty and an "unfinished quality." He hopes this guarantees him the lifetime diversion of perfecting her. Still a girl, Antonia discovers her mother employs her as screen to casual infidelities; her father, as sole repository and scapegoat for his bitterest disappointments. Antonia becomes natural attraction to the callous predator. In later life, even her own grown children will find her useful. To love and be guileless is a fine thing, but worldly unwise. Updating the long tradition of English women novelists headed by Jane Austen, Howard examines the observant innocent, whose superiority in the moral scale now wins her nothing at all. Except the privilege of perceiving her own life in round, living it on her terms: the solitary dinner is on the table, and she sits down to it.

To me this is one of the best novels of the mid twentieth century and I have no idea why it is not now in print. The plot is an intricate, absorbing story of the beginning and long dissolution of a marriage. The characters haunt you because their story never quite resolves. The structure of starting 'in the present' and moving back in time creates its own suspense, as each 'older' episode illuminates the characters and their situations, and increases the sense of sorrow. But although things become clearer, they never become clear. The husband is an impossible man, Conrad Fleming, who is initially repellent, then devilishly manipulative, then sympathetic, then a mystery, but he is a strong and compelling character. He is one of the fine sadists that are stock in English literature, often written by a woman. To mystify, evade, patronize and shape their chosen partner is their sex play. The central character, Conrad's wife, Antonia. is equally mysterious, a strong woman and yet a masochist. This book touches on solitude, and most on how other people stay unknowable, even in 'the long view'.