Holiday by Stanley Middleton

On two occasions has the Booker Prize been awarded to two winning novels in the same year. In 1974, Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist and Stanley Middleton's Holiday were the lucky two.

Gordimer's The Conservationist is clearly the better regarded of the two. It is still in print and widely available. Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991, and The Conservationist was shortlisted for the "Best of the Booker" for the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize. Holiday was out of print for many years and was so completely forgotten that the Times of London sent the novel's opening chapter to 20 different literary agents in the guise of a young author trying to get published, and the work was unrecognized by all of them.

So you won't be surprised to discover that I liked Holiday much more than The Conservationist.

It's a story told fairly simply: there are numerous flashbacks, but not needlessly obscure. Nor are there any effects to estrange the reader from the characters in the story.

Edwin Fisher, employed in academia, is on holiday in a town called Bealthorpe, an old-style seaside resort, rather twee and dusty. There's little more to do there than to take walks, sit on the beach, enjoy the kind of entertainments that were old hat thirty years ago, and go to the pub. And talk.

Edwin talks to many people. He does so almost against his will, because that's what his father used to do, and he is tremendously embarrassed by the memory of his father. But talk he does. "Nature is fine, human nature finer," he quotes more than once.

Edwin is married. He's at the resort alone. Why is he alone? Where is the wife? Everyone asks him this, and he never gives a straight answer. We learn that there has been some trouble. The marriage is over. And Edwin discovers, to his chagrin, that his in-laws are visiting that same resort town.

During his holiday, he splits his time between negotiating with his parents-in-law over what it would take to reconcile, and being both friendly to and standoffish from the people he meets--his fellow hotel guests, some bikinied girls on the beach.

We see more and more flashbacks of Edwin's marriage to his wife Meg. Her reactions seem outlandish and dramatic, though it's probable that they are simply thrown in sharper relief by Edwin's tweediness. It's very possible that he's an unreliable narrator.

Ultimately, the novel seems to be the story of a man who has lived such a male life in such a male world, that he simply does not find himself able to live with someone who does not seem to respect masculine primacy. Edwin Fisher may be the 60's/70's British version of the modern man-child. Unlike the TV show and toy obsessions of today's man-child, Edwin occupies himself with nostalgia and quotes, a pat on the head, and a half-crown to go to the pictures with.

Middleton's prose is beautiful and clear, and he paints a vivid images of a long-gone England that was so very old even back when it was relatively new. He creates characters who can talk, who like to talk, and who like to talk with people who like to talk.

If there is any flaw, it is that the novel ends a bit too quickly, that the ending is just a bit too pat and convenient to fit what we know of the flawed and broken characters.

But then again, by that point, the holiday is over, and there isn't further time for sitting around.

Next up: Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.