Another part of the wood - Beryl Bainbridge
Introduction
Like all Beryl Bainbridge’s novels, Another Part of the Wood sets off at a cracking pace, and never slows down. We find ourselves immediately in a strange setting – a camp consisting of huts and bunkhouses in a wood at the foot of a mountain somewhere in Wales. George, the son of the family who own the estate, and Balfour, his assistant, are awaiting the arrival of Joseph. George regards Joseph as a great thinker and hopes to have some serious tête-à-têtes about Art. But when Joseph arrives he is not alone: he has brought his girlfriend Dotty, his son Roland, and an unexplained fat boy called Kidney whom he is hoping to save by making him do exercise. He also casually reveals that he has invited another couple, Lionel and May, who will turn up later. So, the promised tête-à-têtes – like so many of Joseph’s promises – never materialize.
The camp (based on a real camp Bainbridge once visited, built by a Liverpool philanthropist as a place for slum families to get fresh air) is meant to be a sylvan paradise. But for the townee visitors it is a place of claustrophobia and discomfort. The bunk beds are too small and poorly arranged; the blankets are scratchy and probably have fleas; there is much business of finding matches and lighting paraffin lamps and stumbling outdoors in the dark to use the chemical loo. It is an uncomfortable place, where uncomfortable things will happen.
The sense of impending disaster is relentless from first page to last. We know someone will get seriously hurt; the suspense is not whodunit but who will do what, to whom? We guess the victim will probably be the child, Roland, or possibly the sinisterly named Kidney. We gather there is something badly wrong with Kidney – he is overweight and ‘simple’ and has to keep taking pills – but is he a possible murderer or, alternatively, a murderee? Or is he, or Roland, going to be subject to sexual abuse? There seem to be plenty of potential abusers in this neck of the woods. Most of the men are to some degree weird: George, the six foot eight giant who keeps talking about Jews; Balfour, his assistant, who stutters and has funny turns; Willie, another local, who looks like one of those ‘pastoral Welshmen who called the cattle home and loved to fondle little girls’; and Lionel, the dapper older man who seems to have a masochistic relationship with his snappy wife, May. ‘How she abused him. How he loved her,’ he sighs.
Then there is Joseph, the central character of the book, based, according to Bainbridge, on her ex-husband, and depicted with clear-eyed antipathy. He sees himself as a great idealist and patriarch, a saver of souls, a fount of liberal ideas and good intentions. He has planned the holiday in the wood as a way of getting closer to his son, who lives with his ex-wife, and he has promised Roland that they will climb the nearby mountain together and have proper father-son conversations. But Joseph soon forgets his promise, being distracted by his girlfriend Dotty and his ‘project’ Kidney. He is already bored with the whole pack of them. ‘Why,’ he wonders, ‘was it so difficult to like anyone for any length of time, let alone love them? He wasn’t sure if he was unable to love because he had no tenderness for himself or because he felt himself to be perfect and out of reach of compassion. His ex-wife said it was because he was a selfish bastard …’ And in the event, Joseph never climbs the mountain, never pays attention to his son.
Another Part of the Wood was first published in 1968 and is set just a couple of years earlier. There is mention of Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence and Churchill’s funeral and a quote from The Who’s ‘My Generation’. May, who is keen on clothes, dreams of wearing a coat with Italian seams at the waist, and cream stockings and toffee patent shoes and beige nail varnish. She tells Lionel they ought to buy a Union Jack to hang over the bed because ‘all the best people, even the Armstrong-Joneses possibly, pinned Union Jacks up all over the place.’ But all that sixties fashion is happening far away in London. Here, in the wood, we feel much closer to the fifties, even to the war. Lionel constantly reminisces about his war experiences, implying that he had a good war though he was shot in the buttock, while George is obsessed by the Holocaust and has planted all these trees in memory of lost Jews. (Bainbridge – typically – never explains why George is obsessed with the Holocaust, but has often said in interviews that she was: ‘I think the only reason I ever wrote at all was because of being taken as a child to see the Holocaust newsreels. And such was the shock of that, I was always mentioning the Jews, because I had pictures in my head all the time.’)
The novel explores a very sixties preoccupation: the breakdown of family values and the loss of love. Lionel believes in love, but he has a peculiar way of expressing it, whispering dirty stories about Lalla Rookh to his wife instead of actually doing anything. Joseph spouts about universal love for all mankind but can’t be bothered with individuals, and poor Roland, Kidney and Dotty, who hope to be loved by him, are doomed to disappointment. Meanwhile, Balfour, who for all his funny turns seems to be the voice of common sense, reflects that, whereas his family was poor and his father ‘a right yob’, at least there was a sense of loyalty, of sticking together. ‘But somewhere along the line Joseph and Dotty and the rest of them, old George too, had cut themselves free from that sort of thing, gone out on a limb. They didn’t really feel they belonged to anyone any more.’
Another Part of the Wood is officially Bainbridge’s second novel after A Weekend with Claude (1967), though she had already written Harriet Said, which was not published until 1972 when she switched publishers from Hutchinson to Duckworth. At this stage she was an ex-actress in her mid-thirties, divorced with two children, living in a flat in Hampstead and writing at night when the children were in bed. Another Part of the Wood – like all her novels – was respectfully reviewed (she says she has never had a bad review in her life), but she did not achieve any sort of fame until The Dressmaker and The Bottle Factory Outing in the 1970s. Her publisher Colin Haycraft of Duckworth insisted she write a novel a year, but by 1979 she wanted a break, so he told her to revise Another Part of the Wood for republication. Her revisions mainly consisted of cutting out adjectives.
It was Haycraft who taught Bainbridge to pare her prose to the bone, and she has followed his advice ever since. Her first drafts are often ten times longer than the published version but then she cuts and cuts until she is satisfied there is no unnecessary word. Sometimes, I think, she overdoes it and cuts words or sentences that the reader actually needs for understanding, but Bainbridge would rather the reader was puzzled than bored – she hates the idea of spelling anything out. That is why her novels are always so short, leading to the common misapprehension that they are slight. They are far from slight, they are huge, but they read at such a breakneck pace it is almost impossible to pick up all the clues and jokes and nuances first time round. Another Part of the Wood, like any Bainbridge novel, repays double reading – once, quickly, to resolve the dreadful suspense, and then again, slowly, to enjoy its sly, rich subtlety.
Lynn Barber