In Praise of the Trilogy – Gerard Woodward

I sometimes read a novel and wish that the characters could live on  a little longer – and generally this is the main indicator that I’ve had a really good read.  More usually I don’t regret their passing at all.  However, with Gerard Woodward’s trilogy about the Jones family, I had the rare treat of reading each novel and being so engrossed that I could hardly wait to get on to the next.  For once I’m inclined to agree with the publisher’s blurb, “all the characters in this book will haunt the reader long after they have put it down”.

Woodward has the “shortlist syndrome” shared by such excellent writers such as Beryl Bainbridge who also never quite won the Booker prize.  In Woodward’s case his near-misses are as follows:

2001 Whitbread First Novel Award (shortlist)
2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist)
2005 T. S. Eliot Prize   (shortlist)

The novels in his trilogy are about the extremely dysfunctional North London family of Aldous and Colette Jones.  August came first and is set in the 1950s, focusing on the annual family holiday, camping on a farm in North Wales.  The book was Woodward’s first novel, written after he had already published three award winning books of poetry.  Woodward ably choreographs the families difficulties with the increasingly erratic Colette and eldest son Janus taking centre stage as they weave their destructive way through the family history.  Janus is musically gifted, going on to study at the Royal College of Music but feeling that his real vocation is self-destructive behaviour, telling his parents that “it is my vocation to cause you pain to counterbalance the pleasure you had in conceiving me”.

The novel ends in the 1970s with Collette sniffing glue and spending time in a mental hospital while Janus’s drunkeness is leading to violent rages.

In I’ll Go To Bed At Noon, the story darkens even further and reflects in the family much of the conflict and turmoil of the 1970s.  Janus is now banned from the house, but keeps managing to return, even though he has to stage a number of break-ins through the changing locks.  This wonderfully written book chronicles the on-going break-down of the family, with Janus continuing his downward spiral through endless alocholic binges, Colette having to care for her senile brother who seems to want to drink himself to death, and Aldous re-discovering his artisitic vocation.

Janus still retains his musical talent and during one of his visits home launches into Schumann’s Carnival and then his own transcription of a Beehoven Quartet while swigging endless cans of lager, the recital ending with him “walking over to the sink and vomiting.

We read of the damage caused by these people to the youngest child, Julian, who manages to retain his sanity despite longing to be left alone by his terrible relatives.

By the end of the book, Aldous finds himself almost entirely on his own.  The reader is left breathless and stunned by the cataclysmic way this family lives its life, wondering what can possibly happen next.

A Curious Earth opens in the 1980s with Aldous leading a solitary life in a state of self-neglect and chaos.  His condition has deteriorated to such a state that he allows potatoes to sprout in a cupboard drawer and grow into a tangled mass of elongated shoots.  He soon finds himself in a geriatric ward (after the inevitable “fall”) but this jolts him out of his despair and he resumes interest in art.

After coming out of hospital, Aldous somehow manages to re-invigorate himself and visits his son in Ostend, where life seems to open up in new and unpredictable ways. On his return, he starts Flemish lessons and meets Maria – a red herring if ever there was one, being frustratingly available, but only strictly on her own terms. Aldous tries to share his passion for Rembrandt with her but not very successfully, only resurrecting his own passion for Rembrandt’s mistress Hendrickje Stoffels.

Woodward ends the book as kindly as he began it by allowing Aldous to meet his own Hendrickje Stoffels and it is hard to turn the final page without feeling that you have read a greatly compassionate work, tolerant of the human condition, but with a gentle humour which smoothes over some of the cracks of Aldous’s obvious deficiencies.

It would be difficult for me to recommend this trilogy enough.  If ever “writing” can speak realistically to the human condition then this is it and the reader will end the series having encountered in Gerard Woodward a compassionate and thoughtful mind who brings the poets eye to this tragi-comic history.