Customer Reviews

Mr. Chartwell: A Novel

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The new novel MR CHARTWELL is simply remarkable! Author Rebecca Hunt takes an ambitious risk in giving literal life to the depressive states that stalked world leader Winston Churchill throughout his life. He called these depressive episodes his "Black Dog". Writing a novel with such a premise could have been a disaster but Hunt does such a skilled job that the short novel is eye-opening and inspirational

The book takes place over a six day period in the summer of 1964 as Churchill prepared to exit the British Parliament for the final time at the age of eighty-nine. Hunt brings the aged leader and the time and setting vibrantly to life as Churchill again wrestles with his "Black Dog" who in this imagining is a huge talking black canine who calls himself "Black Pat" Chartwell. Black Pat exhibits the more unsavory habits of dogs (such as bone chomping and other messy eating habits) along with a cunning intelligence that leads his victims in to the abyss of depression. In his own words there is a reason he is an animal "a dog with the hunger of a dog and I am compelled by it."

Churchill is not Black Pat's only interest. We are introduced to a pretty young widow named Esther who unwisely rents room in her home to the black beast just when she is at her most vulnerable. Helped by caring friends and a revealing encounter with the great Churchill himself it looks like she will be able to break free of the dark demon.

Many who have depression or other mental issues that impinge on their happiness and productivity will identify with the characters in MR. CHARTWELL. The book is also a helpful allegory for those who love someone with depressive issues and in my favorite scene from the book Churchill's loving wife Clementine confronts Black Pat herself and the reader sees how her years of support helped her husband reach his great successes despite his emotional burdens. MR. CHARTWELL is highly recommended to all intelligent, discriminating readers of literary fiction.

Esther Hammerhans has been a widow for two years and is currently a librarian in Westminster. She hides in corners to escape notice and has just taken the brave step of furnishing her dead husband's study to rent to a lodger. The only prospective tenant is an enormous and messy dog named Mr. Chartwell, who offers her an astronomical sum for a short term rental. She objects, but he insists on renting the room, and promptly makes himself (most uncomfortably for her) at home. It turns out that the attraction of Esther's room is that it's only a fifty-minute commute to Chartwell, Winston Churchill's country home. The year is 1964 and Churchill is only a few days from retiring from Parliament.

Black Pat, as Mr. Chartwell is more familiarly known, is quite the humorist and fond of amusing wordplay. He does have a dark side; he's the embodiment of Churchill's lifelong depression--literally his bete noire--and, permanently ensconced in Churchill's life, has designs on Esther's. Esther, suffering from survivor's guilt after her husband's suicide, is a prime target for Black Pat, but Fate takes a hand with a little nudge from her martinet boss at the library and the support of her friends Beth, Oliver and Corkbowl as well as an intervention from the Great Man himself. Esther is required to go to Chartwell to transcribe Churchill's retirement speech. Esther's little group of champions rallies round to steel her for the ordeal and what transpires is an absolute delight. This is a book that begins with an unlikely premise and some doubt as to whether or not Ms. Hunt can pull it off, but ends with the realization that this is an unusually lovely story with a perfect ending.

Give Rebecca Hunt a solid B+ for her vivid imagination. She's created a full length novel using, as the simplest of starting points, Sir Winston Churchill's description of his depression as a "black dog." It's a whimsical tale, short on plot, long on character, the most dynamic of which is the titular "Mr. Chartwell," Churchill's dark companion made actual. He's six foot seven, a "strikingly hideous Labrador" with dense black fur and a "broad face split by a vulgar mouth." Mr. Chartwell comes into the lives of the novel's characters (including the former British PM), causing anguish, destruction and anxiety. Lassie he ain't.

Meant to be "enchanting...charismatic, sinister, yet seductive" (all according to the folks at Random House), Mr. Chartwell is instead thuggish, vulgar, manipulative and remarkably unpleasant company. In other words, depression personafied. So, at the same time that Hunt is successful in giving corporeal weight to an emotion, she hasn't created a character I want to spend much time with. Nor does anyone else in the story, for that matter. And I can't say I warmed to the book's theoretical heroine, Esther, a mousy, damaged young widow whose conflicts with Mr. Chartwell form the novel's core.

Personally, I just don't think Hunt is a good enough writer to pull off the sleight of hand she's attempting here. Chief among her faults is complete and utter adoration of her own style, with which she continually pummels the reader. Take the book's first page, which contains a staggering five --count `em, five -- metaphors in as many lines: "Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill's mouth was pursed as if he had a slice of lemon hidden in there...Grey dawn appeared in a crack between the curtains, amassing the strength to invade. Churchill prepared himself for the day ahead, his mind putting out analytical fingers and then coming at the day in a fist, ready for it. A view of the Weald of Kent stretched beyond the window, lying under an animal skin of mist." Perhaps not everyone will find this over-written, but I find it dreadfully so. Moving forward, it often seems as if Ms. Hunt has written with a thesaurus at hand for the sole purpose of expressing her thoughts in the most arcane, awkward way possible.

Some examples:

"Thoughts of Mr. Chartwell...were a wound which wanted its bandages quietly lifted to assess, stomach in flight, what lay underneath." Stomach in what? Whose stomach? The thought was a wound and the wound has a stomach?

"For a long time the weeks of her life had drifted past as ghosts. There was a rare bump of pleasure, perhaps from a meal out or a visit to the cinema, but it was brittle and shattered under the lonely monotony of the ghost days." A brittle bump of pleasure? What does that mean, isn't there a simpler way of expressing this?

"The dresser was more than a storage place for holiday trophies; it was a strategic device for forcing good memories to the lid of the mind, a raft in a sea of empty grief." Metaphor piled upon metaphor, each one more labored than the next.

"[Mr. Chantwell's] instincts sent out frequencies and recorded specks of phosphorescence in the blank screen of Esther's deliberation." Come on now, is that even English?

"Beth rolled her eyes, used to [Dennis-John's] insults. They came in a salad of venom and mad exaggeration..." Salad, really? Meaning what exactly? If there's a clearer way of saying this, why doesn't Hunt do so?

"Thoughts of Michael tunneled through the rubble burial of the past two years. They emerged at a better time, at the times before, at one particular time not far before..." The woman's remembering her dead husband, can't Hunt simply say this?

"She slowed to skim her coffee to a manageable level, then sped up, heading to a table in the...staff canteen." Skim her coffee? With what? Of what? What does skimming coffee mean, actually? Is this something lost in trans-Atlantic translation?

"A feeling in Esther rocked on its base and threatened to spill." Does Hunt mean spill over? And if the feeling is solid enough to have a base, what part of it is liquid enough to spill over?

I know I'm sounding remarkably picayune, but page after page finds Hunt mangling the English language, twisting her words and ideas into poetical nonsense; as she might say, a salad of bad metaphors and obtuse expressions.

And are we really to believe that Esther, a librarian in the House of Commons, for goodness sake, has never heard of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles?" Hiring standards in Parliament must be very low, indeed.

Ultimately -- as is abundantly clear -- "Mr. Chartwell" failed to engage me on most levels. I liked the idea of the novel, but felt that Hunt undermined the emotions of her story by constantly drawing attention to the presumed cleverness of the writing. For a book that deals with the deepest of emotions, I felt only cold disinterest.

Rebecca Hunt's `Mr. Chartwell' begins with an original premise, storyline and even some strange turn of phrases; describing an "animal skin of mist" and sometimes some overwrought descriptive passages-"hysterical clouds of steam". Some phrasing such as" in the hospital of his bed" might leave one wondering what picture she is exactly trying to convey. There is, in many instances a huge amount of description. For example; a paragraph telling about a friend, Beth sitting, uses 7 out of the 10 sentences to tell what the room divider behind her looked like, what it held, what the shelf behind her had on it and that near her was "perhaps a lama or a goat with a raffia tail", none of which really pertains to the story line, which at times, even if you like to be able to picture a scene, it just begs to "get on with it".

We are left until the later part of the book to find out what has happened to one of the main character, Esther's husband. It does create some interesting suspense as we gradually realize what this story is trying to tell us, although reading the Dear Friend letter in the beginning helps. I do wish there was a reason given why Mr. Chartwell just doesn't stay at Chartwell, other than there would not be a story.
There is much of the novel filled with whys?, but it is still strangely intriguing - trying to describe depression can be strange, in a way, this novel captures the essence.

Is this a creative book? Yes. Is it an original plot and characters? Yes. Does it have a unique voice? Yes. Does it "work"? Not completely. At least not for me. The main characters in the book are Churchill, the Black Dog, and Esther. The Black Dog is both a character and a metaphor (something that isn't absolutely apparent at the outset of the book- you are left wondering if this is a type of book where animals can talk). As characters the people in this book are life-like and relateable for the most part, but I still kept thinking it would have made a better story if instead of using the Black Dog metaphor they just came out and discussed the depression that afflicted the characters that the book would have been more successful. But perhaps it is just that my brain does not get the British logic of the story. Overall, I would recommended this book because it is so unique and creative and that it is a different way to discuss a delicate issue.

There is something silly, cloddish and offensive on practically every page of this book. As you have probably gathered from the other reviews, this is the story of Mr. Chartwell, Black Pat, a larger than human, black dog who is a metaphor for the effect depression has on Esther and Winston Churchill. Admittedly, this is an almost impossible feat to pull off unless you're Kafka.

But Hunt's efforts, pathetic as they are, are further hampered by a sadistic need to torture her native tongue, often with with clumsy, weird, disgusting, or self consciously outrageous metaphors and syntax. For instance, Churchill looking at a portrait of his father, "His father, that obelisk in his life...". "The other half wanted to stay for this reason, entertained." "Esther was cut off by a new thought, the desire to ask it a hot coal in her." "Esther's heart burst like an egg yolk." "....Esther fighting the impulse to squirm off on the legs of an octopus at his closeness." "Pitched against him in a struggle, she would be like a sponge thrown against the teeth of a chain saw." You get the idea.

Here's what passes for wit: "Getting all dolled up...Dulled up is probably the best I can manage." "Whoops. Dennis-John's at high tide." "Obnoxious guinea worm."

As for the 'charismatic dog', here are some samples of his charisma. "Black Pat licked his jaws, making an infuriating wet sound." "Black Pat's face appeared, the huge mouth open in a slash of red." "'Oh my God.' She bent into the fridge. 'What's this?', 'A pineapple.' Black Pat checked over a shoulder to receive appreciation for the joke, a scene for canned laughter. No laughter, just a cold wait for an explanation. The cards clapped down. 'It's a bone, obviously.'"

Wit? Charisma? Perhaps life has passed me by. Perhaps I'm hopelessly over the hill, too out of touch to understand the deconstructive, post modern semiotics of the new language, but this book is an affront to everything I've ever enjoyed when I read. I'm appalled to find something this fraudulent was actually published.

MR CHARTWELL looked like it might be an interesting way to help understand depression, but forget that. And as for any kind of enjoyment, failed TV sitcoms seem brilliant by comparison. It's such a doltish lump of glop that it's not even amusing in its badness.

Originality usually means that something doesn't fit into neat categories, and that characterization fits Mr. Chartwell to a T. Part fantasy, part allegory, part historical fiction of the sort pioneered by E. L. Doctorow, this is literary fiction that is at once whimsical and serious. While it was an easy read, and I appreciated its uniqueness, I remained ambivalent about it throughout.

The title character is a massive, messy black dog with many human qualities who embodies depression, haunting and taunting his quarry and generally making their lives miserable. He first appears dogging (sorry!) Winston Churchill, one of history's most famous depressives, who described his affliction as a black dog. The dog, who assumes the name Black Pat, next appears at the doorstep of Esther Hammerhans, who has advertised for a lodger. And of course, it turns out he's far more than that and had already touched her life in a profound way she knew nothing about.

The book covers five or six days in 1964, just prior to Churchill's retirement from Parliament, and predictably, the plot brings Esther, Churchill and Black Pat together, propelling them toward a resolution. I enjoyed a lot of the dialogue, which was often clever and witty, and I appreciated the ambition of what Rebecca Hunt attempted--and achieved--but the underlying theme of depression was, inevitably, a bit of a downer--perhaps because I live with someone who suffers from it.

I also never really felt the characters leap off the page and as a consequence didn't really get emotionally involved with them. This is a short book, but there have been other short books--novellas, even--that have grabbed me and blown me away. This is Hunt's debut novel, and I feel as if given time and a little more seasoning, she may come up with something truly extraordinary. She's clearly talented and has an unusual take on the world that she manages to make accessible. I'll be watching her career with interest.

In the meantime, three and a half stars for this book.

A previous reviewer called this book "Quirky, charming and ultimately uplifting" and I wholly agree. If you struggle with depression [and like dogs], this book may be especially meaningful. "Black Pat," the depression that haunts Churchill and Esther, is oddly likeable. I was torn between wanting to smack the mutt and pet his fuzzy black head - think "secondary gains" for all you therapists out there. The final message was good but hard to hear. How's this for depressing? Rebecca Hunt absolutely nailed her first book, and from now on, everyone will always expect great things from her.

To paraphrase Elvis Presley, depression "ain't nothing but a hound dog." In an audacious conceit, Ms. Hunt imagines the depression that hounded Winston Churchill his entire life as exactly that - "unmistakably a dog, a mammoth muscular dog about six foot seven high" whose short black fur is "dense and water-resistant, his broad face split by a vulgar mouth."

This mesmerizing dog's day job is the consistent persecution of Winston Churchill, who, at 89 years old, is on the cusp of retiring from his position as prime minister. In real life, Churchill often referred to his depression as "that black dog". However, in a bold move, Mr. Churchill is really relegated to the role of bit player in this very original book.

The real protagonist is Esther Hammerhans, a young widow, a House of Commons library clerk, who is approaching the anniversary of her husband's death. When we meet her, she has decided to rent out her guest room, and the giant Labrador - aka "Black Pat" - comes to look it over. Her first instinct is to hide but hide where? "There was nothing in the hallway to dive behind, it was a wasteland."

After wrestling with herself, Esther decides to let Black Pat - or metaphorical depression - stay, at least on a trial basis. She finds him to be strangely seductive: he makes bad jokes, builds a barbecue in her garden where he cooks coots and old shoes, misbehaves in dog-like manner, and tries to inveigle himself more thoroughly into her life.

It will fall to Churchill - who is intimately familiar with Black Pat and wonders aloud to him "whether you were there, waiting to stake your flag from the moment my soul entered the earth" to minister to Esther and give her guidance to cope. Churchill says, "...it will struggle on its knees to serve, fighting out the inches in dust and desert. But do never forget where it is migrating to, for it will bear you there. It is a migration into the dust." He has learned through trial and error that "we are still captains of our souls", despite the fight it takes to remain there.

There are strengths and weaknesses in this audacious novel. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated 20.9 percent of American adults alone - or about 9.5 percent of the U.S. population who are 18 and older - suffer from a mood disorder. The novel speaks charmingly and originally about how depression is perceived by one who is coping with it. For the imaginative personification of depression alone, this is a book worth reading.

However, it is precisely this unconventionality that sometimes works at odds with itself. Black Pat too often appears immensely loveable, not the fearsome force that cause too many adults to suffer or even take their own lives. More problematically, Ms. Hunt seems to wrestle with whether to keep using Black Pat as a metaphor or to make him a fully-realized being who can think, feel, and destroy.

Ultimately, the book begins to read like a parable. Anyone in Esther's place would be depressed; her depression is not the organic kind that Churchill appears to suffer from. The reader never quite feels the menace. At the end of the day, the characters (with the exception of Black Pat) come across as lacking verve and complexity.

This is, after all, a debut book, and Rebecca Hunt amply signifies that she has the talent and rich imagination to become a force to be reckoned with. Her ability to take on the "bęte noir" of Winston Churchill is audacious and bold. Would that she had gone just a little further.

Mr. Chartwell is Black Pat, the literal embodiment of Winston Churchill's black dog of depression. For Churchill, whose depression is part of his DNA, Black Pat is monstrous. He physically overpowers Churchill, taunts him and gloatingly refuses to go away.

When he first appears to Esther Hammerhans, as a potential lodger in her home's boxroom, Black Pat is a little different. Ludicrous, ungainly and repulsive in habits, he is also strangely compelling and attractive. No wonder, in a way, because Esther is coming up to the second anniversary of a dark day in her life.

Because depression isn't part of Esther's being, Black Pat must woo Esther. He has a strange way of doing it: making a complete mess of her home and being all-around disgusting. But it's a measure of how close she is to despair that she can't bring herself to drive him away, even once she realizes what he is.

In just a little over a couple of hundred pages, Rebecca Hunt deftly paints a picture of Winston Churchill, his wife Clementine and Esther. It was painful to read about Churchill's struggles against the black dog, but heartening to hear his attitude toward his foe. Not dissimilar to his attitude toward the Nazis in WW2. Clementine is Black Pat's implacable foe. Esther is not quite as well drawn, but I put that down more to the flattened affect you'd expect from somebody who hasn't managed to overcome her grief.

This very quirky book about depression is actually funny. It's filled with clever wordplay and disgustingly amusing sight gags. It's a sly black comedy and an impressive debut for Ms. Hunt. I'm looking forward to seeing what she comes up with next.