Alwynne's Reviews > A View of the Harbour

Elizabeth Taylor’s novel shatters many cherished myths about post-WW2 England, here there’s no sense of the supposed camaraderie forged by years of people ‘pulling together’ or of a people now filled with renewed belief in a better tomorrow. Instead, Taylor’s penetrating portrait of a small, decaying seaside town, complete with salacious librarian, and a down-at-heel waxworks crowded with sculptures of infamous murderers, is pervaded by an atmosphere of melancholy, and flashes of the tawdry or the macabre - at times reminding me of Barbara Comyns’s particular brand of domestic gothic, at others of Dylan Thomas’s, slightly later, Under Milk Wood another slice-of-life piece set in a fishing village, filled with similarly memorable, somewhat-eccentric characters. From a distance, approached from the sea, Taylor’s fictional town seems picturesque, but close up it’s dingy and dilapidated. War is over and the world has moved on, deserting the town in favour of a shiny New Town just across the bay.

Taylor’s narrative’s highly allusive but most prominent is the shadow cast by Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse which partly reflected on the aftermath of an earlier war. Although Taylor and Woolf share similar themes, Taylor’s work is more rooted in the real, even the mundane. Like Woolf, Taylor is interested in inner and outer worlds, in art and creativity, here played out through the experiences of local novelist Beth Cazabon and incomer Bertram Hemingway, but in Taylor’s society their links to art provide them with no special insights or elevated sensibilities, no likelihood of wider cultural significance. Bertram represents himself as a painter but he’s actually an amateur who rarely produces anything, more intent on insinuating himself into the lives of the townspeople, particularly the women. The prolific Beth immerses herself in her writing, producing work that seems to bear little relationship with the world outside her imagination. She’s unaware of the looming threat to her family posed by a close friend, and she lacks understanding when it comes to the inner lives of her husband and daughters. Both Bertram and Beth, like all of the characters here, are a curious mix of sympathetic and incredibly off-putting. Beth can be frustratingly oblivious to many things, but her musing on the challenges faced by the woman writer form a convincing critique of domesticity, as if she’s indirectly responding to Cyril Connolly’s earlier predictions about the danger “the pram in the hall” posed to the artist but reframing them from a more feminist perspective. Bertram is bizarrely vain, intent on his own, self-centred perspective and his views on women are appalling yet he can also be oddly sensitive, particularly to the house-bound, ailing Mrs Bracey.

There’s little in the way of a plot, even the hint of a conventional marriage plot’s obscured by other events. Nothing particularly spectacular happens, Taylor seems more focused on her version of the ‘dying fall’, the fading away of hopes or dreams and ultimately of life itself. She’s particularly adept at exposing casual cruelties, conjuring the small acts of betrayal and deception that shatter illusions or that can blight a person’s entire existence, as in the town’s summary judgement of diffident, lonely widow Lily Wilson. But although Lily’s more obviously isolated than many, isolation, and loneliness seem all-pervasive here - if the book were a painting I could imagine each figure firmly outlined in thick, black lines, all possibility of real connection between them severed. Overall it’s a fairly devastating piece but it’s rescued from utter bleakness by Taylor’s skill and her subversive vision: her array of unexpected and unusually-striking scenes or details; her sudden injections of wry comedy; her arresting dialogue and expressive descriptions of nature. And sometimes, Taylor offers her readers fleeting glimmers of hope - for meaningful connection, for intimacy or tenderness