Customer Reviews

The Queen of the Tambourine

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

(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

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."

Gardam is amazing and this novel is one of a kind, superbly so. Just read it. If I tried to talk about it at all I'd make a mess of it.

Winner of the Whitbread Award for best novel, this is a witty and affecting journey to the brink of madness.

The narrative takes the form of letters from Eliza Peabody, affluent 50ish wife of a senior civil servant, to her equally middle-aged but less dutiful neighbor, Joan. The first letters begin as brief notes, reproaches from a stiff-necked busybody to her hypochondriac neighbor.

But then Joan absconds to wander the Middle East, leaving husband and children behind, and Eliza wonders if she is to blame. She takes in Joan's husband and encourages his attentions. The letters lengthen and become more erratic as Eliza's personality spills out on paper. Her own marriage dissolves when her husband goes off with Joan's husband, and Eliza traces the years of its unraveling between visits to a young man dying of AIDS in a hospice, long walks with the two dogs (hers and Joan's), and musings about the other neighbors.

As it becomes apparent how isolated Eliza is in her South London home, her narrative becomes increasingly suspect. It seems less certain that her husband and Joan's have any relationship other than a desire to escape Eliza. Far from being a most important personage at the hospice, Eliza is shunted off to do the dishes, possibly because she talks too much and inappropriately too.

Yet her self-revelations to Joan are plaintive, appealing and sometimes hilarious. As Eliza reveals herself less of a figure in the world, she becomes more of an individual - a wildly imaginative individual with a flair for anecdotes.

But it seems that not all of Eliza's anecdotes are real. But what is real and what is not becomes increasingly difficult for Eliza herself to determine. Meanwhile she continues to explore her deepest feelings on motherhood (Eliza is childless), marriage and social expectations.

She develops new relationships in the community, particularly with the precocious children of the overbusy curate and his wife. Or does she only wish that she has?

Midway through the novel, everything is suspect, except for Eliza's voice which grows stronger and truer as she sheds expectations- both of and for herself. Gardam brings her protagonist back from the abyss of madness at the end. She also lets the reader know where Eliza has crossed the line between imagination and reality and why.

Unfortunately, to do this, she uses a device which is too simple and detracts from the integrity of its protagonist and the complexity of a marvelous narrative. This ending mars a novel which is otherwise sharply, incisively written with an intriguing heroine balanced on her private desert of shifting sands.

"Angela's Ashes" is alternately funny and sad, but Jane Gardam's book is three times as funny and three times as sad. A work of genius!I can't recall admiring a novel more.

Dense with delightful detail and shot through with wit and pathos, this is a wonderful novel. It works on several levels: a caustic commentary on contemporary Britain, an unsentimental portrait of stifling Britain past and, at its heart, a moving story of a lonely woman come unhinged. No word is superflous, no character without meaning. The end was disappointing: too tidy and less than convincing, but that's a minor complaint about a startlingly fresh, entertaining and affecting story. I look forward to reading more of Ms. Gardam's work.

This awesome book puts you in the mind of someone slowly sleeping into mental illness. Highly recommended!

Like reading a novel in dialect, I often have an adjustment during the opening pages - or the first few letters - of an epistolary novel. If I had not absolutely loved "Old Filth" I may not have tried "Queen of the Tamborine", but I did, so I did. Thank heavens. It is breathtakingly well written and I fell into it from page one. The protagonist, who appears smug and self-righteous at first, just the kind of person who needs to just get a life and stop interfereing with the lives of others, opens up like a flower into a complex and interesting woman.
I eagerly anticipate re-reading this novel and ferreting out more and more Gardam.

Books by Jane Gardam were recommended by Maureen Corrigan about 1 year ago (May 19, 2008) on NPR's Fresh Air show. It was explained that she's an under-recognized author in the U.S. but much better known in the U.K. I immediately set out to read the books that Ms. Corrigan mentioned, "Old Filth," "The Queen of the Tamborine," and "The People of Privilege Hill," and I just loved them. "The Queen..." was definitely my favorite. It is at times gut-busting hilarious but also extremely poignant and moving. Jane Gardam creates funny, interesting, quirky, and very believable characters. She is obviously a very keen observer of human nature and has thought deeply about the human condition. She must be one of those people who sits on buses and park benches and carefully watches the people around her -- imagining their likely back-stories and then filing each persona away in her mind for later use in her writing. For the last several months she has been my favorite author and I have sought many of her lesser-known books (some novels, others compilations of short stories). Just Wonderful!!!

This story held my attention because the writer creates such a fascinating character, whose letters to another woman tell her history, reveal her personality, and her fragile state of mind. At first, she's an appalling busybody, but she quickly becomes sympathetic when she experiences a personal shock that cracks a facade bolstered over a lifetime of repression, and ultimately awakens to her true self. As her sense of propriety crumbles, she confronts the truth about herself -- her youth, marriage, relationships to her neighborhood -- and she's sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking. At the end, I had to go back and re-read to "get" what she had hallucinated as opposed to what had really happened, even though her creator/author has her clarify the madness for the reader at the conclusion.