"Quartet in Autumn" by Barbara Pym - book review

Barbara Pym was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for this book in 1977, which was eventually awarded to Staying On by Paul Scott (which I read at school). Of the Pym I've read so far, this definitely felt like the most literary of her novels: right from the beginning the theme and variations of the quartet of characters (Edwin, Normal, Letty, and Marcia) hums and vibrates. Once more she returns to the same trusty materials: the unmarried, lapsed engagements, domestic life, libraries, the church, vicars, eating lunch in London restaurants, women's expected emotional and domestic labour, the fecklessness and stupidity of men. But in her 16-year hiatus of unpublished underappreciation, she seems to have matured as a writer as she matured in age. Her subjects are, like her, older and autumnal; her themes deeper, concerning the place of her characters within society, the imperfect welfare state, the world of work, and the loss of power and status of the church.

These people are not likeable, but I found myself warming to them and rooting for them. Who else could turn milk bottles, garden sheds, and tinned foods into such poignant and loaded objects?

The pacing is also a marked change: the focus shifts rapidly and seamlessly between each of the four main characters and sometimes beyond them like a melody dovetailed between instruments. One sometimes loses track of their separate identities: which woman dyes her hair again? Who lives in their own house and who in a bedsit? Which one of them was married before? Pym's own love of snooping on people is a constant refrain: Marcia following Norman into the British Museum at lunchtime; Edwin and Norman both finding themselves outside Marcia's house, subconsciously checking up on her; Marcia spying on her beloved surgeon Mr Strong's house in Dulwich; Mrs Pope, Letty's landlady, waiting until Letty went out before looking through her things to find out more about her; the social worker, Janice Brabner, checking up on Marcia; Marcia's neighbours, Priscilla and Nigel, watching her in the garden - I'm sure there are other examples I'm forgetting.

This book didn't fill me with the same Pymsy pure delight as Excellent Women; it's colder, more sombre, closer to death, old age, and loneliness, but it's no less impressive and compelling. I can see why this book broke through. Touching, sad, heartbreaking, but not without hope and humble joy.