J Murray £16.99 pp277
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala subtitles this novel “Chapters of a Possible Past”. “Even when something didn’t actually happen to me, it might have done,” she explains. “Every situation was one I could have been in myself, and sometimes, to some extent, was.” This might stand as a definition of how most fiction writers, to some extent, operate, and there is no need to know anything about Prawer Jhabvala in order to savour this fine collection of stories.
That said, the characters and settings certainly reflect the author’s own peripatetic life and are familiar from her other books: emigrant communities in post-war London, Westerners adrift in India, gurus and socialites in Manhattan. The names, backgrounds and parentage of the nine narrators change from story to story, but there is a consistency of tone: reminiscent, ruefully humorous, accepting. For the most part, they are women to whom things happen, and there is a distinctly Hindu fatalism about even those of them who do not have Indian antecedents. The story Pilgrimage, for instance, opens: “When my mother died, C sold whatever he could of her possessions, and with the proceeds he and I went to India.” C, it transpires, is not a family member, merely a European refugee who became one of the mother’s lodgers and subsequently the narrator’s lover. He is on his way to becoming a more or less fraudulent guru, and in Delhi is immediately taken up by a wealthy young woman keen to found a rival cult to that promoted by her mother. C is whisked off to fame and fortune in America and the narrator ends up in a remote Himalayan ashram looking after her rival’s stricken mother. Similarly, the young European narrator of Dancer with a Broken Leg somehow allows her beautiful Indian husband to slip out of her grasp without being able or willing to do anything about it.
Elsewhere, women are seduced by and become subservient to forceful but unappetising male egotists. In Ménage, an emigré pianist in post-war New York dominates the lives of three women: his wife, her married sister and her niece. In another story a former lover, now a crooked businessman bloated by success, reappears in the narrator’s life, still seeing himself as a Krishna who expects women to be gopis dancing attendance on him. The women, however, usually have the last word. Their stories are narrated some time after the events they describe, which gives them a resigned, philosophical quality. These storytellers are cool, detached, often describing their own experiences as if they had happened to someone else altogether. And it is this which gives them their strength, prevents them from seeming — for all their passivity — mere pawns in other people’s games.
Some of the stories are very funny in their quiet, dry, unobtrusive way. Perhaps the best of them is Springlake, which takes its title from a large family home on the Hudson. Chekhov is explicitly evoked in this story, but there are shades, too, of Edward Gorey. When the narrator’s father dies, she and her brother are obliged to consider the future of Springlake. Both are in their way artistic, partly because their father’s wealth meant they never had to earn a living, and they have vague dreams of turning the house into some sort of performing-arts centre. Hapless in love, hopeless with money, the siblings have stumbled through life and are delighted when an eccentric character from their past, who (though from Kansas) once styled herself Madame Voronska, sweeps back into their lives. Maggie, as she likes to be called, is now some sort of dubious Princess, and sets about organising everyone, forging alliances and generally causing mayhem. This is a wonderfully droll and touching story with enough material packed into it for a whole novel.
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Indeed, many of these stories are characterised by economy, a mere line sufficing when lesser writers might have provided reams of detailed description. For example, the unvoiced feelings of a young woman undergoing an abortion in India are solidly and horrifyingly evoked by a glancing reference to “some kidney bowls and other semi-clinical objects” in the room where the operation is to be performed. The prose throughout is clean and uncluttered: the sort of writing that marks out a genuine mistress of her craft.
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