God on the Rocks by Jane Gardam (Europa, 2010; originally published by Hamish Hamilton in 1978)

 

This short novel has the typical Gardam eccentric and poignant flavor, but it seems somewhat under-baked and carelessly wrought.  It is  amusing and lively and bright; it's just not particularly moving or coherent.  But as its subject is the effect of other people's past on our present--particularly a parent's past on their children--perhaps that ramshackleness is appropriate.  

The novel takes place in small English seaside town during a warm summer in the 1930s, when Margaret Marsh is eight years old.  Her father, a bank manager and fundamentalist Christian, and her mother, a spirited and independent  woman whose real love was thwarted by class differences, are not at all well-matched and fall dramatically apart.  Their disunion is aided and abetted by two people: Lydia, Margaret's sensual and morally unfettered nanny, and Charles, the decent, but inconsequential upper-class man that Elinor, Margaret's mother, loves but was forbidden to marry (by Charles' mother).  

Gardam moves freely in time and space, and sometimes skips abruptly from character to character, in glancing takes.  I think the problem may be Margaret herself, whose preternatural wiseness and maturity are somewhat difficult to believe.  She is an interesting and engaging, but not an entirely believable character.  Gardam leaves a lot out of her story, expecting the reader to make connections and fill in the blanks.  This gives the book a pleasant airiness and softness, but one perhaps wishes the entire thing was a bit more digested.  But this  book's fresh crispness may satisfy--and delight--less expectant readers.  I can image a better, more potent and  devastating version of this book.