Sara's Reviews > A View Of The Harbour: A Virago Modern Classic

A View of the Harbour is a slice of life built around the smallness of a small town and the limits of every life within it. In this microcosm can be found love, envy, betrayal, longing, jealousy, unwelcome truth, and total misconception--all lived within the cruel spyglass of a place where too much is known about your life and too little about your soul.

There is an ensemble cast of characters, most of whom are part and parcel of this harbour town, where the lighthouse illuminates only in passing and the shadows seem deep and impenetrable.

“The lighthouse was the pivot, and the harbour buildings, the wall, the sea were continually shifting about it, re-grouping, so that it was seldom seen against the same background.”

Like the harbour, the people seem to be constantly re-grouping. These people see each other only for a moment, in glimpses, and then indistinctly. Taylor seems to be telling us that the human soul is unfathomable and perhaps knowing another person is impossible, because the perspective changes drastically depending on the point of view taken.

Guilt, she saw, treachery and deceit and self-indulgence. She did not see, as God might be expect to, their sensations of shame and horror, their compulsion towards one another, for which they dearly paid, nor in what danger they so helplessly stood, now, in middle-age, not in any safe harbour, but thrust out to sea with none of the brave equipment of youth to buoy them up, no romance, no delight.

Into this fixed society comes a stranger, Bertram Hemingway, and it is through him that we see much of what is really going on beneath the surface. Bertram’s point of view is that of the outsider, and often clearer than those of the inhabitants themselves, but Bertram is just another person who suffers from a desperate desire to be remembered, to be distinguished somehow from the masses, while feeling acutely his own mediocrity.

Elizabeth Taylor, the writer, who should not be confused with the film star, writes with marvelous perception and deceptive understatement. It might, in fact, seem that there is very little going on in her novels, until it strikes you that what is going on is life. Her writing seeps into your brain and lodges there, and you find yourself contemplating the complexities of her simple and ordinary people, who are so very like yourself.