When I first read Quartet in Autumn I think I found it a little sad – veering towards depressing. Maybe this is the kind of book that one needs to be in the right frame of mind for. This time I found I really loved it. Although this novel does seem to be a bit different from other Barbara Pym novels, there are still plenty of Pymisms to be found. This was the novel that was published in 1977 after Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil had both separately and independently of each other, named Barbara Pym as the most under rated novelist. It was also the novel which found her nominated for the Booker Prize. There certainly is a more melancholic feeling to ‘Quartet in Autumn’ – focusing as it does, on four lonely people as they approach retirement from a dull unimportant office job. “That day the four of them went to the library, though at different times. The library assistant, if he had noticed them at all, would have seen them as people who belonged together in some way”Edwin, Marcia Norman and Letty – work together in an unspecified office. They have worked together for a number of years – and although they are a similar age – they don’t socialise out of work or have any kind of personal relationship. Letty and Norman each live in bedsits – while Marcia and Edwin each live alone in what were family homes, Edwin in the home he shared with his wife, Marcia in the house she lived in with her parents. Edwin likes to visit churches in his lunch hour; Letty sometimes goes to the library. Marcia remembers with fond nostalgia her time in hospital, where she under- went ‘major surgery’ under the auspices of Mr Strong for whom she nurses tender feelings. In the shed in her over grown garden Marcia hoards empty milk bottles, just as she hoards tinned food – although barely eats anything. When Letty finds the house she lives in is sold to a new landlord, a pastor of an obscure African church, she is nervous of the noisy lively family he brings with him and with Edwin’s help re-locates to a new room in the home of octogenarian Mrs Pole. Marcia and Letty retire before Edwin and Norman (remember the days when women retired five years earlier than men?) – and while Marcia and Letty need to adjust and find ways of filling their days, Edwin and Norman occasionally wonder how “the girls” are getting on. Marcia is annoyed by a medical social worker who keeps trying to call, while Letty settles into a new routine with Mrs Pole. “In Mrs Pole’s house the telephone rang just as she and Letty were settling down to watch television. They quite often did this now, and although it had started by Mrs Pope suggesting that Letty might like to watch the news or some improving programme of cultural or scientific interest there was now hardly an evening when Letty did not come down to watch whatever happened to be on the box, whether it was worthy of attention or not.”The story of these quiet sad, lonely people are not entirely dispiriting though, while Marcia becomes more obsessive and secretive – Letty at least shows she is able to remain positive and move forward in her life, even beginning to reach out to the people around her by the end of the novel.A novel of four ageing lonely people who have out lived their usefulness – whose jobs, when they retire will not be re-filled – is understandably poignant, but it is also shot through with Barbara Pym’s sharp humour. In ‘Quartet in Autumn’ Barbara Pym seems in part to have been examining the fate of single elderly people, who is it that will look out for them? Whose responsibility is it to see that someone is taking the necessary care of themselves? The system (as Pym must have seen existing in the 1970’s) is seen to fail Marcia – who seems to slip through the social care net. These characters who I once found so sad, spoke to me in a completely different way this time. Barbara Pym’s minute observations of people, are quite brilliant, the humour and pathos are handled deftly and saved this from being overwhelmingly sorrowful.
What did I think? A hard question to answer succinctly here. I felt like a voyeur reading this novel, like I'd snuck into all four protagonists' neighborhoods and somehow got into their homes to peek behind their net curtains. Primarily the two female protagonists' homes, I should say, as they were considerably more developed. But it was a bit of a guilty pleasure witnessing even their most mundane goings-on in the office, in their homes, and in their communities. Not a lot happens in this novel, not by modern action-thriller standards, yet I found myself eagerly picking it up to know what would come next, and oddly comforted by that urge to read on. Every chapter had heartbreaking moments of human frailty and very British inability to connect or communicate on the most simple level. I found myself cheering on each of these four unusual (and frustrating) and very real people throughout their stories. Four people who's lives are only loosely connected, and yet that flimsy connection is all-important. This book delivered what all great literature does -- a surprising view and new understanding of what it means to be human, to interact with our fellows in ways they want us to and ways they don't, to try a thing, to wish we knew how to try, to pretend we didn't wish for anything at all... to tell ourselves we want for nothing. She reveals much, sparingly. It's deeply funny, delivering the kind of astonished realization that comes several seconds after a very dry punch line. It makes you feel good to read it, page by page -- like somehow, you've been chosen. This is the first Barbara Pym I've now read -- and I read it because my writing was once compared to hers. I'm really proud of that comparison now and eager to discover more of her work soon. The friend who made the comparison reports that this is Pym's most "somber book." Considering how much a truly enjoyed this one, I can't wait to see what else is in store.
What do You think about Quartet In Autumn (2004)?
Oh, I loved this book! And I had no idea of the connection to her life. My favorite Pym is Less than Angels--that main character is so feisty. Thanks for this review.
—Cathy
A more intense Pym work than ever. Reading Pym is like someone sitting eye to eye with you and talking very honestly about the private thoughts, faults, and wishes of people. No baloney, no highly-built plots, no messiness. Her characters are aggravating, just like people we know. They aren't always attractive or sexy. They age and make mistakes and sometimes cannot get outside of themselves. And they often miss the brass ring, but are still ok in spite of it. And through these characters Barbara Pym wrote again and again about the beautiful sweet and sad mixture that is life. Excellent Novel.
—SarahC
There's something magnetic about Barbara Pym's prose and her prickly, very private, isolated protagonists. On the book's cover, each of the characters faces away from the centre; indeed, a very superficial reader might leave this book with the impression that the characters don't much like each other. But that would be to mistake their very British reserve for lack of compassion. On the contrary, there is so much compassion in the awkward way that the four retired protagonists connect. Their thoughts run unbidden to one another, the tiny echoes of past interactions, in the absence of pressing current concerns, dictate their inner (and outer) lives.Pym's ability to write the quotidian rhythm of life without losing the reader is both artistic triumph and a reaction to the hegemony of the young. Away from the current of social change of 1970s England (though not unaware of it), away from the passion of youth and the caprice of narrative, Quartet in Autumn finds humanity and hope in quiet and unnoticed lives. "In life we are become death," thinks one of the characters, but this book's vitality reverses that, drawing the continued possibility of change and growth from some forgotten place between office drudgery and the grave.
—Josh Friedlander
