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Literary Review
Steady does it
GLAMOUR and romance are not what we associate with the 1950s. History may well prove the decade to be as low and dishonest in its way as those earlier ten years famously written off by W.H. Auden in "September 1939". Yet even such negative qualities, in the context of the Cold War, Eisenhower's America and what in Britain, on the present monarch's accession, was hopefully termed "the New Elizabethan Era", lack an equivalent resonance. From a social aspect, the sense of the whole period is that of a drab interstice between the vividly registered experience of the Second World War and the transgressive 1960s, making it tricky territory for a novelist.
Since Crossing the Lines is part of a chronological sequence of novels plotted along the mid-20th-Century timeline, Melvyn Bragg must take the 1950s as he finds them. The book's setting, what is more, is provincial England, a world whose preoccupation with respectability and emotional reticence makes stern demands on a writer's imaginative resources. Within an ostensibly narrow north-western pale enfolding Carlisle, Wigton (where most of the story is set) and rural Cumberland, the transcendent virtues of Bragg's characters, persistence, loyalty, firmness of moral purpose and an intuitive grasp of others' potential goodness, are more clearly outlined by a striking absence of rhetoric, a plainness in speech and dealing among them at even the most heavily charged moments of personal confrontation.
Quite possibly, in the case of Bragg's hero Joe Richardson, the edges of this interior toughness will be blunted or softened by contact with the more sophisticated obliquity he encounters as a scholar at Oxford in the final chapters of the book. His adolescence has been surprisingly untormented, and his parents Sam and Ellen, busy running a pub, have found space to offer a muted but continuing support to their growing lad. "We'll stay where we are till he's through", declares Sam, and the reader easily accepts the implication that such patient constancy is as pivotal to Joe's success as his education at the local grammar school.
Though he arrives at university as a history student, English literature evidently has a more potent impact, through the works of the region's most famous poet. Wordsworth's "The Tables Turned" and "Intimations of Immortality" provide transforming encounters, their doctrine of opening the heart to nature and curiosity made central to Joe's development. Cleverly Bragg avoids self-conscious literary piety in the boy's classroom discovery of the poems, by earthing the whole scene in his erotic daydreams about Rachel Wardlow, the farmer's daughter currently fancied by the school rugby captain.
Such a rival is seen off easily enough, calf-love deepens into a more complex passion, and, as the book's title implies, another line is crossed in the process. Joe would have preferred a Wordsworthian setting, amid fells and waterfalls, for their first sexual encounter, but has to be content with the front room in the house of an aunt whose slumbers must on no account be disturbed. The trajectory of the affair, ending in a broken engagement, is followed through the novel's final chapters, where Rachel's renunciation is a bid for freedom from Joe's suffocating possessiveness. In either case the characters' resilience is tested but unimpaired.
Others meet harsher destinies, like school-leaver Lizzie, victim of a drunken gang-rape in a derelict house, her boyfriend Speed, cashiered from the army, or Sam's wartime pal, Robert Carter, driven to suicide by battle traumas still unexorcised. Including such episodes seems designed merely to emphasise the rough-with-smooth ordinariness of existence on which the novel centres. As an individual creation rather than a unit within a series, its roots lie in a peculiarly English genre of provincial rites-of-passage novel typified at one extreme by Arnold Bennett and D.H. Lawrence and at the other by the best work of a mass-market writer such as Catherine Cookson. In Crossing the Lines the Englishness has been further highlighted by frequent allusions to the layered historical experience of Wigton and its surrounding area. Local associations with King Arthur are recalled, reference is made to Carlisle's Roman past, and Joe's last meeting with Rachel takes place beside a hilltop megalith.
Unfortunately Bragg's style lacks either Lawrentian fire or Bennett's satirical inflections, while his structural mechanisms could profit from an oiling with Cookson's narrative energy. Certain passages of dialogue, such as the undergraduate discussion of "Waiting for Godot", are too plainly generic, and the insertion of topical detail (Eden, Suez, Eoka, and so on) needed more careful judgement. Some of the language used sounds oddly inauthentic. "Nerdy" and "We're talking" (followed by a substantive) belong to a later age. So does "the Holocaust" as a historical term specifically referring to the Nazi massacre of Jews. As the mirror of a particular strain of Englishness at a specific period, Crossing the Lines commands respect, but to succeed as a work of fiction it needs a stronger overall dynamic in its plotting, a more insistent pace and a greater sense of self-propulsion than the author seems interested in creating.
Crossing the Lines, Melvyn Bragg, Sceptre, p.490, £17.99. 0 340 82965 6
@The Times Literary Supplement
JONATHAN KEATES
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