16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I never knew my tribe. I've always been on the edge, just hanging about.", September 6, 2007
This review is from: The Queen of the Tambourine (Paperback)
(4.5 stars) Eliza Peabody begins writing to her neighbor Joan, not a close friend, almost immediately after Joan leaves her husband Charles and disappears, leaving behind only a series of addresses around the world where she may be contacted. Eliza takes it upon herself to write to Joan repeatedly, offering unsolicited advice, observations (unintentionally insulting) about Joan's husband and children, and comments about her role as a woman, which she knows that Joan does not share. Joan never answers.
Over the course of more than a year, the letters become longer and more revealing, ultimately showing Eliza to be a frustrated and mentally disturbed woman who may need hospitalization. As she spirals downward and begins to hallucinate, most readers will empathize with her (as much as one can empathize with a meddlesome and impossibly tactless woman) while questioning if anything she says is the truth.
Jane Gardam, with her supremely subtle humor, creates in Eliza a character few readers will be able to resist. Thinking herself a realist who calls a spade a spade, Eliza has no clue that others regard her as rude, unthinking, and self-centered--someone whose lack of awareness leaves her open to accusations of malice. Her messages to Joan, filled with dramatic irony, show her to be far from the "helpful friend" she thinks herself. When Joan sends her a pair of elaborate earrings, resembling tambourines, she is called the "The Queen of the Tambourine" by Barry, a young man dying in the hospice she sometimes visits.
As Eliza goes about her daily life, including her hilarious attendance at a local literary group meeting, the author's ability to create clever satire and wonderful observations about love, marriage, and friendship shine with the candor of one who has little patience with pretension and a person's lack of self-awareness. Few writers can match Gardam's sense of irony, and she is subtle and clever in creating Eliza's letters.
Illustrating the absurdities inherent in a suburban lifestyle that Joan has escaped and which Eliza wants to preserve, Gardam creates a leisurely and assured novel about self-awareness, the opportunities and limitations of marriage, and the constraints of society. The liberating role of sex in a healthy relationship, and the role of fantasy, especially as it relates to sex, infuses the novel. Wry, clever, and thoughtful, this Whitbread Award-winning novel from 1991, newly republished by Europa Editions following the success of Gardam's Old Filth, should expand her literary reputation on this "side of the pond" and gain Gardam many new fans. n Mary Whipple
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gently Going "Dotty" in South London, August 5, 2000
Slowly working my way through the Whitbread winners, it was a treat to come across Jane Gardam's tale of Eliza Peabody's sadly entertaining descent into madness. Lonely Eliza, abandoned by her husband during a mid-life crisis, tells her story through letters to Joan, a departed neighbor she barely knows. Gardam weaves a compelling and utterly convincing tapestry that illustrates the delicate balance between madness and sanity, and how the balance tips day to day, minute to minute. The language is beautiful, the ending surprising, the memory haunting. Certainly deserving of it's Whitbread accolade, "The Queen of the Tambourines" is oddly foretelling of Michael Cunningham's recent Pulitzer winner, "The Hours."
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