4th February 2021, Zoom. All nine present.
This was the majority preference from SC’s shortlist for February 2021. It had been suggested as a worthwhile read by a former club member. It’s a short-ish book, covering the coming of age of a 16 year-old boy, Robert, who can’t wait to leave his pit village in North east England and his uninspiring family. He does this by setting off to walk… somewhere. He sleeps under hedges, under a tarpaulin, forages for food. Quite soon he meets up with Dulcie, the ageing owner of a small cottage with a runaway garden, which provides work, and as he overhauls a tumbledown shed his relationship with Dulcie and her dog Butler (‘German Shepherd’), develops.
It’s been very well reviewed on Amazon – somewhere around 4.5 stars. The public vote seems in favour… so what did the BBBC make of it?
As it turned out, most of us liked or loved it. There was one exception, SC, who loathed it.
For most, the lyrical descriptions painted vivid and appealing pictures of a rural idyll, of a simpler time immediately post-war, and of the burgeoning relationship between Robert and his mentor and muse, the ageing but ‘not-going-quietly’ Dulcie. The awful reality of holidays, as RV described it, was brought to life vividly, described through the girls on the beach, enjoying themselves out of context only to return too soon to humdrum lives. CW cited the mellow feeling engendered by the descriptions of summer days in the countryside, bees buzzing, hot sun – important for CB too. He noted the connections between Dulcie’s character and the real-life female adventurers Amy Johnson and Freya Stark. JH felt she was a real character, a wonderful creation with a great back-story. He also appreciated some of her observations: planners and architects being ‘janitors of mediocrity; peddlers of dreck’.
The coming of age experience reminded some of Lawrie Lee’s ‘As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning’; for MT the voyage of adolescent discovery took him back to his own youth, and contained elements of his favourite book ‘The Magus’. AA enjoyed the quote: ‘They occupied that no-man’s-land between adolescence and adulthood, where insecurity and innocence, joy and world-weary cynicism do battle, where different masks are tried on for size’. CB drew comparisons with The Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and the 100-Year-Old Man – both tales in which the protagonist simply decides to get up and go, making a story of their resulting adventures.
For AA, CB and WM it was ‘like stepping into a warm bath’ – AA looked forward to it every night. As he imagined the poet Romy entering the offing, he equated it with Robert’s own story, beginning as a boy but ending as a man. It plucked similar chords for JH, who was reminded of adolescent experiences that he felt had made him a more rounded person and, on the whole, felt it was soft, light, evocative and affirming. WM experienced the book as romantic, gentle and enjoyable.
The simplicity of the plot appealed – it was a framework on which to hang a weave of descriptive prose. MW thought it was a lovely book – a breath of fresh air after Time’s Arrow, as did CB. He felt the secret to enjoying this book was to go with the flow. The characters were big (including Butler the dog), well drawn and developed over time, and the story of the developing relationship between Dulcie and Robert was believable and transporting.
For RV it was well-written and enjoyable. There were clunks in places but not enough to distract. He particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the darkness, when Robert was sleeping out in Dulcie’s meadow. AA picked up on this too: ‘Night settled upon the meadow like a trawler’s net sinking slowly to the deeper waters, the sun fading as the gloom enfolded everything within it’. The talk around the weather reflected exactly the way the English will always have something to say about it. JH observed that this was a universal connection.
Myers’ writing about the aftermath of war hit home for some – the portrayal of shattered menfolk hanging round the farms good for nothing. Also his descriptions of the shipyards as Robert passed through. JH recalled a quote about war: ‘started by the few, fought by the many’. Even SC grudgingly admitted that this was one of the few areas in which he felt Myers managed to hit a target.
What wasn’t so great about the book? For a number of people Myers had a tendency to overdo the descriptive prose – too many adjectives when simplicity might have been more effective, and this became overbearing. RV mentioned that discussing the ‘gene pool’, as Dulcie and Robert did, would not have been possible in 1946. And there were other anchronisms, including the appearance of crab sticks 30 years before they were invented. For some the attempt to write the poetry in Romy’s best-selling anthology fell on its face, but for others it didn’t matter. CB felt the theme around the working-class lad taken in as a project by a better educated older woman was rather trite and patronising – too glib, neat and not really much of a lesson for society. WM wondered if the sum of £400 that Robert received after publication of the anthology wasn’t a huge and unbelievable sum for a poetry book in 1946.
SC struggled with the book throughout. The use of a certain kind of sentence structure to infer literary awareness simply served to suggest airs and graces: ‘But I was a young man once, so young and green, and that can never change. Memory allows me to be so again.’ Real people don’t talk like that. Or this: ‘Guided only by gravity’s pull of the downhill camber’…
The adjective problem was typified by the sentence: ‘clodded clouds were folding themselves into furrowed peaks to the far blurred line of the offing.’ And overall he felt it all seemed rather self-conscious. The Offing doesn’t creep up on you, quietly snaring you with its prose – Myers crashes around flourishing affectations and shouting ‘look at me, I’m a poet, really I am’. Which SC was firmly convinced he was not. The ending was terrible and pompous: ‘I sit back down and type the final sentence of the story about lives led as freely as greater forces would permit. These are my last words and I leave them here for you’. SC wondered if he was expected to weep with gratitude.
So as you can imagine, there was a bit of a points differential between us: Apart from SC, all marks were between 7.5 and 8.5. However SC gave it 2.0, so the overall average score was 7.17.
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