Fiction: Every family has its problems, but some families are more unfortunate than others. Neither poverty nor illness proves the greatest hardship for the Jones clan; the agony of ordinary living is the real difficulty.
This is a family in which dreams, ambition, memory and romance prove extreme burdens. Aldous, artist by nature and teacher by profession, and his imaginative, wayward wife, Colette, are the parents of four children including the gifted if impossible Janus. British poet Gerard Woodward continues, in his Booker-shortlisted second novel, I'll Go To Bed At Noon, the story he began so brilliantly in his glorious début, August (2001).
The new novel takes up the story in 1970 and follows the family, as the adults age and the children grow up, through that decade in which romance and innocence were finally crushed by cynicism. Sequels possess appeal as well as pitfalls. Probably the toughest challenge facing Woodward with this second book, another traditional narrative, is a simple one - the first is so good, so well pitched between nostalgia and realism, that a sequel appears destined merely to dilute the magic.
Yet, for all its kindliness, Woodward's gentle vision is not sentimental. Instead, he allows his well-conceived characters to stagger through the chaos created by change, most noticeably the evolution of a child, from baby to adult. His saga moves between tragedy and farce, and even at its most grim and squalid, two elements triumph consistently: humour and the sheer poise of a subtle handling of language that never forsakes Woodward, not even in a novel that at times falters into over-plotting.
The first book followed Aldous and Colette, a couple brought together by Aldous's friendship with Colette's brother, and kept together in their raising of four children. Woodward establishes a period feel to August. In the course of searching, by bike, for an idyllic summer holiday destination for his young family, Aldous, is hit by a motorist. This incident brings him to a Welsh farm on which a field in the heart of the landscape becomes a second home to the family. Once the tent is pitched each year, the family retreat into a world as intimate and as comforting as home.
From the beginning of that first book, Woodward selects Colette, funny, kindly and suitably eccentric, as the central character. She remains a puzzle, an Earth Mother who wears fussy dresses and carries a handbag when climbing mountains, and who later takes a job on the buses in order to pay for her mother's reburial into a private grave. Colette's first-born, Janus, is a talented pianist whose gift brings its own grief.
Woodward evokes a family caught between social classes. Aldous and Colette appear to have a rather literary, almost intellectualised rapport, which is engaging if also confusing as the story develops.
The first crisis is the decline of Colette's mother. " . . . Colette found it ever harder to recall the mother she'd known. It was similar to the loss she felt as her children grew up. It was hard to remember them as babies. Watching a child grow up is to watch it die a hundred times, each new self overlaying the old, concealing it." Observations such as this demonstrate the way in which Woodward moves between the general and specific incident.
It does no disservice to I'll Go To Bed At Noon to concede that it emerges as a stronger novel when read against the historical texture and subsequent narrative cohesion conferred upon it by the earlier book.
Simply managing to live becomes an ordeal as various addictions are introduced into the narrative. As Janus, the talented boy of the first book, evolves into the vicious loser of the second, Woodward does run the risk of losing the gentle tone that underpins both novels.
It is curious that he places such an emphasis on Colette's family; much of the narrative drive comes from her birth family and the respective dilemmas and losses of their adult lives, while Aldous, the dreamer, is the self-contained son of a Welshman who had come "to London in 1910 and married Edith Alice Hobbs, a girl from the Kentish North Downs who was in domestic service". Aldous's father was a self-taught man who'd "turned to Shakespeare originally out of a desire to improve himself".
Whereas the first novel dances with images, such as the one of Aldous whose struggle with a tent is likened to wrestling with angels, I'll Go To Bed At Noon, with its glue sniffing and rampant alcoholism, moves from mood to episode and relentless incident as the history of a family is written.
Ultimately, Woodward is chronicling both the creation and death of a family as seen through the experience of a man who dedicated his life to being part of a little domestic world that gradually disappears just as a traditional family holiday finally stops.
If overlong and frequently suspended between the lyric and the violent, Woodward's large-hearted, vividly descriptive novel, best contained within the covers of both novels as two interdependent books, possesses freshness as well as a sense of paradise lost in the relentlessness of reality.
I'll Go To Bed At Noon By Gerard Woodward, Chatto, 437pp. £12.99
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
