Relative Successes by A. L. Barker (Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1984)

 

Another smart and astringent book by a writer who continues to intrigue me. 

Relative Successes is a book in three parts.  The first part relates a summer in southern Frances, as experienced by two teenage British schoolboys, Jessell and Waldo, and Waldo's  beautiful and beguiling mother, who enchants Jessell, who remains enthralled by her well into his adulthood.  The middle section deals with Jessell's later encounters  with Waldo's wife Daisy, who claims her husband has mysteriously disappeared.  So Jessell travels to southern France with Connie, his wife, because he has a hunch that Waldo may have returned there.  The concluding section takes place in France where Jessell and Connie befriend a strange couple staying at their resort -- a middle-aged woman who is a kleptomaniac and her handsome and virile much younger husband.  The book ends with Jessell thinking he has caught of glimpse of Waldo at a circus.

It's hard to know what all this means -- the novel doesn't seem to amount to anything, although page by page it is engaging and curious.  The writing isn't quite as idiosyncratically brilliant as in some other of Barker's books, but it's vivid and witty.  So not a first-rate Barker, but an interesting and worthwhile read nonetheless.