Virgin birth investigation turns lives upside down in devious English novel

LITTLE PLEASURES
By Clare Chambers

It is June 1957 and The North Kent Echo, an English suburban newspaper, received a letter from a woman stating that her daughter, now 10, was the result of a virgin birth. The newspaper’s only female journalist, the sensible Jean Swinney, resigns herself to accepting the task of investigating the woman’s allegations (“It’s in the interests of women, after all,” the editor said contemptuously). Jean’s skepticism is challenged when witnesses corroborate that the author of the letter was bedridden and under constant surveillance in a female-only medical facility at the time of his daughter’s conception, making any kind of sexual activity nearly impossible.

This is the starting point for “Small Pleasures”, British novelist Clare Chambers’ first work of fiction in nearly 10 years, and although the mystery of the virgin birth guides the plot, it becomes a backdrop. almost accidental in a novel that is quietly affecting in unexpected ways. Jean’s days revolve around her newspaper job, where she is treated like “one of the guys”, and caring for her obnoxious and stuffy mother in need. The pleasures of her life are indeed small, her indulgences limited to the occasional cigarette and ice cream, and admiring a drawer full of trinkets she collects – soaps, perfume, stationery, still in their original packaging. . All of the characters in “Small Pleasures” seem to be struggling: trapped in an unhappy marriage; endure the abuse of an aging parent in the throes of senility; or, in one particularly heartbreaking case, resigned to an existence unfolding entirely in a coffin-like iron lung.

As Jean spends time with the woman she is investigating, who turns out to be a pretty seamstress, she finds herself faced with a family life she covets, comprising a lovely daughter and a husband whom Jean begins to fall in love with guilty. . The seamstress, in turn, does not appear happy in her seemingly idyllic marriage, harboring her own repressed wishes. Again and again, however, the characters choose duty – which Jean describes as a “woman, tall and lean, with long hair pulled back in a bun” – over happiness, as Chambers examines, sympathetically and incisively, at what point people should sacrifice themselves. carry to the detriment of their personal freedom.

The most captivating glimpse of Jean’s oppressive self-denial comes during a week-long trip with his mother to a coastal town, where they are stranded inside with other hotel guests during heavy rain. The holidays are portrayed with such hilarity, including scenes of old Mrs. Swinney constantly complaining, that they could take place in a Jane Austen living room.

After sensitively elucidating the private hopes of his characters, Chambers crushes them in a series of cruel little twists and turns. The virgin birth at the heart of the novel becomes the ultimate symbol of the efforts that are made to deceive ourselves in the name of hope, “this treacherous friend”. Religious belief serves as a beacon to which the characters cling to preserve themselves. The seamstress reassuringly explains the disturbing voices that her daughter sometimes hears as belonging to angels; it is the same faith that gives the woman with the iron lung the strength to endure her condition, and the means by which she rationalizes the male visitor who appears uninvited at her bedside: “Angels are always men.” , is not it ?

With a low-key wit and dry humor, Chambers captures the hypocrisy of an era so punitive for women. (John recounts how a doctor relished telling her that she would probably never be able to have a child after having a clandestine abortion.) Spice up old housekeeping advice between chapters like a sneaky commentary on the action – ” Good Uses for Sour Milk ”, for example, appears when the going gets tough towards the end – Chambers replicates the everyday minutiae of postwar British suburbia, from a dusty woolen skirt to a pudding made. of canned pears and evaporated milk. His tongue is beautiful, achieving what only the most skilled writers can: great pleasure from small details.