Jane Gardam says somewhere in Crusoe’s Daughter that a writer’s discovery of a great character is a divine accident. Perhaps in Polly Flint, the lead character in CD, Gardam imagined someone as intelligent and resourceful as herself but fictionally stranger.
Polly Flint is borne out of the head of Robinson Crusoe. JG imagines a young girl who worships Daniel Defoe’s masterwork as if it were her Bible. Polly Flint is a transposed Crusoe, living in the North Yorkshire moors (where Gardam was born incidentally) from early in the 20th to 1986.
Crusoe’s Daughter is a novel about the emotional survival of Polly, who loses her sole parent, her seafaring father, very early in the book and goes to live in the yellow house called Oversands, a Victorian pile on a hill, surrounded by moors, the sea, and industrial waste. Towards the end of the novel, Polly needs to take her first trip to London and it’s as if there’s been an earthquake in the story.
This novel is as drenched in Englishness as it is in rain. This might put off some American readers who need to have their own country’s social references at hand in order to enjoy a story. But it should be literary caviar to the Anglophiles who practically trample over each other to get a good seat for Downton Abbey.
I’m stunned at the concrete density of Jane Gardam’s realism. It might be worth it to read this novel just to be impressed by how a great writer can knock you out with description. But Crusoe’s Daughter is the most purely character-driven novel that I’ve read in years. Jane Gardam gives herself as a writer…like…nothing to work with in Polly Flint. She sets the bar impossibly high, and then she soars over it.
After Polly loses her only parent, she goes to live with Aunts Frances and Mary in that house on the moors. Also in the house is Mrs. Woods, no relation to anybody, but she’s there because she has no place to go. Mrs. Woods has no resources either so she’s not paying anything into the household. She does occasionally supply coffee. There’s also the housekeeper, Charlotte. Charlotte tragically loses her beloved nephew, Stanley, to illness; a boy who probably would have survived if his family had the resources for better medical treatment.
Charlotte shuts down. She sits in her kitchen chair, a statue of grief. Gardam notes that a pin falls from her hair into her lap. Immobile, she doesn’t retrieve it. The Aunts and Mrs. Woods want her to get up and make the fire so that they all can get back to their lives. Charlotte is counselled that, as a good Christian, her duty is to offer praise and thanksgiving, to get over it. Charlotte’s response is to walk out the kitchen door.
There’s also that look between Charlotte and Stanley when he was alive, so subtle you could miss it if you skipped a sentence. A look of microscopic tenderness such as 40-year-old women should maybe not be giving to boys. Charlotte’s never seen again. Great scene, minor in the story, but you know great writers from the small touches, like that pin.
Polly, in addition to her survival-gospel Crusoe, has read 283 novels from the great Oversands library: Scott, Dickens, Hardy, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Disraeli are mentioned. These are complete sets. DH Lawrence and Fanny Hill don’t rear their provocative heads until late in the story. So Polly has polished off hundreds of classic English stories. And it’s sad that Polly never gets to university, even though the Camelot-like vision of Cambridge is dangled briefly before her eyes.
In the height of its wonderful weirdness, Crusoe’s Daughter visits the hard scrabble farmhouse of a family that has lost a son in the Great War. Polly was a friend, and an ambivalent friend at that, as perhaps we all truly are. But Polly stays over at the working class homestead knowing that her friend’s mother thinks of Polly as the daughter-in-law to-be. This is a false relation, the friend was in all likelihood gay, but at no point during the visit does Polly contradict the family who all assume that a marriage was in the offing.
It’s brilliant sleight-of-hand by Gardam who keeps her fictional cake while eating it. She has a character who’s a social misfit, impractical for all her vaunted practicality and self-reliance, but still makes her a daughter-in-law via role-playing. And it’s not unkind, it’s one of the many surreal but touching scenes in the book. It seems to scream, man, this is weird, only no one says it is, which is ideal.
Polly does lay with Theo, in a wonderful set-piece in a great country house that’s about to be demolished. Theo is heir to an industrial empire owned by his German Jewish emigrant family. As native Germans, the Zeits (wonderful name) are persecuted in England during World War I, so they make the amazing decision to return to Germany.
As for Polly, she inherits Oversands, grows more unkempt, puts on weight, translates Crusoe into German and French and takes to drinking whiskey on the stair landing. Sometimes she doesn’t leave the house for days, padding around in her odd assortment of what she’s calls clothing. It’s like Gardam’s character is dying as a personality in a way that makes actual death no more than a formality.
Early in the book, JG goes all anti-Freudian on us: The deep stamp of past years and even dreams can be eradicated… If you’re a writer, you have to believe that characters can change. Will Crusoe’s daughter abandon Crusoe? Will she leave the island?
JR once said to me that not everybody finds love. And maybe that’s true of our ingenious Polly. But Jane Gardam has set herself an unusual task as a writer: to riff off a character from a most unlikely classic source. To create a woman who lives as if she’s on a deserted island in the midst of society. To create as Jane Gardam says writers must: a novel novel. Originality in fiction being something that you should not quite notice or it isn’t really originality. Jane Gardam makes the reader love Crusoe’s Daughter, dating from 1985. It will be reissued by Europa Editions on April 24th, 2012 in trade paperback.