Review by New York Times Review
"GOD ON THE ROCKS" is so charming a novel that you don't want to give away a single one of the many twists of its plot. As its central character might ask: "Why can't she just - not?" But Jane Gardam must be shared. She's a find who's just beginning to be found, at least on our side of the Atlantic (thanks to the novels "Old Filth" and "The Man in the Wooden Hat"), although more than 20 of her books have been published in England and she has won numerous prizes. Now at last comes the American publication of her early novel "God on the Rocks," which was a finalist for the Booker Prize back in 1978. The narrative unfolds in 1936 along the coast of northern England, where we encounter 8-year-old Margaret Marsh, luminous as a Renoir, who turns her cleareyed vision on the madhouse of the world. "It would be better without people," she remarks to her mother (wishing her newborn brother dead). "If I'd been God I'd have left it at dinosaurs." To which Mrs. Marsh responds: "Margaret, I don't think you ought to talk about dinosaurs. You know what Father thinks." Shortly after their theological discussion, on an excursion away from her own punishingly fundamentalist (mad)house, Margaret comes upon a literal asylum: a ruined Eden, the once splendid estate of Rosalie Frayling, who now lies dying in the former sitting room of her mansion, estranged from her children, surrounded both by priceless art and by the institutionalized insane to whom she's willed her property. When Margaret first glimpses the inmates, wandering the spacious grounds in clothes "washed away into pale pinks and blues and lavenders and whites," they look to her like "our hydrangeas in the back garden where I played hunt the thimble with the lawn-mower screws" and drove her parents crazy. One of the Gardamesque pleasures here, beyond the child's conflation of madmen and hydrangeas, is that we've already heard her father's version of the hidden-lawnmower-screws game, which to him exemplifies original sin. We are in the hands of a master storyteller. Over the course of the novel, Gardam gives us the past and present of her characters' lives, zooming in and out of their diverse perspectives, moving from Margaret's uncorrupted eyes to the more freighted vision of the grown-ups around her: Rosalie Frayling's son and daughter; the daft artist Drinkwater, guileless as a baby, who sits painting on the "burnt gold grass, the great dry lake" of Rosalie's lawn and understands the world as Margaret does (when he can remember to); an old fellow referred to as "holy Bezeer-Iremonger, gassed and good," a mysterious figure who has been "barmy" since the end of the Great War; and, of course, Margaret's infuriatingly understanding mother ("She had secretly found some Freud to read in the public library" about sibling rivalry) and her father, a bank manager and charismatic weekend preacher, a fervid member of a group known as the Primal Saints. Mr. Marsh sermonizes, among other places, on the slippery rocks along the seashore and burns to save the family's maid, Lydia, radiant and outrageous in her flamboyant sexuality. But it's Lydia who does the saving - happily - of Margaret and her mother and even, perhaps, of Mr. Marsh himself. In Gardam's generous telling, these characters bring to mind Philo of Alexandria's advice: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." Thoroughly opaque to one another, and often to themselves, Gardam's characters behave as extravagantly as their Dickensian names would suggest. And yet they're completely credible because they so resemble our most beloved friends and relations. Gardam's 8-year-old heroine thinks the world would be better 'without people.' Nancy Kline's new translation, with Mary Ann Caws, of René Char's "Furor and Mystery and Other Writings" will appear in December.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 31, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
With the birth of her baby brother, eight-year-old Margaret Marsh is banished from the house every Wednesday afternoon to enjoy the idyllic English seaside at peace between the world wars with the family's new, young, and bawdy maid. Largely ignored, the child has all the freedom she needs to observe and quietly condemn the adults around her. Gardam's novel, originally published in the UK in 1978, offers a searing blend of upended morals, delayed salvation, and emotional purgatory, especially where love and sex are concerned. Margaret's mother, Elinor, begins to lose the faith thrust upon her by her zealot husband, who is bent on the conversion of the young maid, despite protest from both women. How perfect, then, that Mrs. Marsh's childhood sweetheart should return to town and provide a decidedly secular contrast to her saintly husband. After a pivotal tea party, everyone hurtles toward inevitable tragedy, with Gardam's intricate prose and keen divining of human nature driving the action.--Jones, Courtney Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
American readers first turned on to Gardam via Old Filth are in for a surprise with the witty though decidedly more serious story of Margaret Marsh, who comes of age in interwar England. Margaret grows up the only child in an oppressively religious household, and her world gets a much-needed shaking up when her mother, Ellie, has another child and hires a maid, the bawdy but loving Lydia. Lydia immediately begins taking Margaret on day trips that open her eyes to the way others live. Margaret's father, Kenneth, meanwhile, sees Lydia as a laboratory for his Godly work, though he ends up being a less than ideal practitioner of the moral lifestyle he preaches. Then there's Ellie, whose reintroduction to a long-lost love tempts her down the path of what might have been. It all leads to a precipice of disillusion for Margaret regarding her parents' behavior, shattering her perceptions and leading to tragedy. Gardam doesn't waste a word, and the story reads as fresh and relevant now as when it was originally published in Great Britain in 1978. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Things are coming apart at the seams for Margaret Marsh during one cataclysmic season in her eight-year-old life. Born between the wars and brought up by her Holy Roller father and his compliant wife as a "Primal Saint" to eschew entertainments and to memorize and recite Bible chapter and verse, Margaret is in rebellion. With the arrival of a new baby in the household, her parents have hired the bawdy and buxom Lydia to help at home and escort Margaret on seaside outings, during which she encounters some eccentric residents of a home for the elderly and insane. At the same time, her mother renews the acquaintance of her childhood friends Binkie and Charles, from whom she'd been estranged since she went to work at the post office and they left for Cambridge. Both new and old acquaintances come together to shake up the once ordered lives of the Marshes. Verdict Published in the United Kingdom in 1978 and only briefly available here, this Booker nominee will appeal to readers who love the Penelopes (Fitzgerald and Lively) as well as Gardam's more recent novels, like Faith Fox and Old Filth. This treasure should send them back for all her books. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/10.]-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Gardam (The Pineapple Bay Hotel) delights in setting off the mad impulses of her characters--with results that often approach antic caricature--and surrounding the resulting helter-skelter with heavy atmospheric effects. Here the scenes for odd frolic are the spouting sea by a small English village between world wars and the enchanted garden of the local mental institution. Rosalie is the owner of this mansion-cum-asylum, a wizened matriarch with the ""head of a wooden little monkey."" who dreams of a love lost long ago. Meanwhile, her disinherited children--Charles and lumpish Binkie--are receiving a visit from Elinor, who some years ago turned down a careful proposal by Charles (he would be marrying much beneath his station) and married instead dapper little bank manager Kenneth Marsh, hellfire preacher of the Primal Saints. Dazzled by the possibilities of public exposure, Marsh soon has his Saints booming out hymns before bathers on the sands, which seems to carry him to an even saltier billow of confidence--into the bedroom of cheeky, ""pudding soft"" maid Lydia, who tells him off right and proper. But not before the pair are observed; by Elinor--who lunges off to cavort nudely before undersexed Charles; and by Elinor's eight-year-old daughter Margaret--who splashes on through the sea, sick and furious. And that night Rosalie, an old Queen Lear, will change her will while lightning flashes and rescue-boat rockets roar outside. Odd doings--with an epilogue twelve years later that shows how these lives will have been snipped and tidied--but Gardam's immaculate specificity of incongruous detail and earth-toned dialogue gives the gloriously implausible a haunting, entertaining substance. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
