I first came across The Echoing Grove in my early twenties, during a period when I was unhappily unemployed and living in a bedsit far from my parental home. At that time, West Bridgford Library stocked lots of Virago paperbacks and having no other occupation I set to to read my way through them all. This 1953 novel of Rosamund Lehmann's, along with her earlier The Weather in the Streets, made a haunting impression on me, and some lines I have carried with me always [see the ticker tape quotes]. For example, whenever I think I might be applying too much make-up, and epecially since I left my thirties behind, I think of Rickie's thought about his wife "beginning to plaster it on, like all of them...”.

I've re-read it several times over the past few years, and if I see it in a second hand bookshop I always buy it. I lend them out, as you do, and of course they don't come back, but I'm pleased to find two copies on my shelf, one of them a Collins Book Society Choice first edition (marked up at 45p).

Reading it this month I was astonished to find it much harder going than I recalled. Not the time shifts - I love the way Rosamund Lehmann slowly layers events and interior monologues to build our understanding of plot and characters. And the adultery plot has me in total thrall, although the Stepney days are a bit of a chore to get through. No, it's the prose; I hadn't remembered it being so poetic and wrought - possibly overwraught. I agree with a fellow reader [from the book group] that it could do with a good edit. Actually I'd love to attempt that job myself.

I couldn't agree with one reader's expressed view that many of the characters, in particular Rickie, are two dimensional. I entered right inside most of them, particularly Rickie. (Repetitions - the echoes of The Echoing Grove being ubiquitous in the novel). At book group I protested: "My heart bled for him". And as another reader pointed out: he is literally bleeding to death inside. The novel did seem to divide the group. In An Appreciation (1985) Gillian Tindall writes of it,

"It is not a book for the young who are still inventing their lives, but the middle aged, to whom experience has become a palimpsest with recurrent patterns. A woman of my aquaintance, whose own life-patterns have been far more fortunate than RL's, has said that nevertheless she finds TEG so sad that she can hardly bear to read it. What effect its terrible honesty must have on readers who are themselves in the grip of destructive patterns, one can hardly bear to think."

Not sure what that says about my younger self, who adored it. And I guess, brought a higher level of mental or intellectual energy to its poetry than I can normally muster these days. After all, I used to lap up Henry James too, in those days. But for all its artistic flaws (and I can see too many to list here), the fates of Rickie, Dinah and Madeleine will haunt me ever.

By the way my dictionary defines palimpsest as: a manuscript on which two or more successive texts have been written, each one being erased to make room for the next.

Helen, May 2005

The Echoing Grove – Rosamond Lehmann

9/5/05 at Helen’s

Everyone agreed that it was not an easy read. Lehmann’s prose is like a tangled maze that you have to pick your way through. She tends to use thirty six words where three and a half will do. She changes from third to first person mid paragraph, and moves from one scene to another in the middle of a sentence. On one page the first person might be from Rickie’s point of view, but half way down the next it changes to Madeleine’s or Dinah’s, then back again. She describes a scene three ways from three different points of view, and backtracks endlessly. To keep on top of this takes careful reading and a lot of concentration. The dividing issue was whether or not the story and the characters deserved that level of attention.

The main sticking point was Rickie. Was he a wonderful character, full of feeling and depth, whose emotions wrung our hearts and whose inability to express and deal with those emotions was his tragedy and the crux of the book? Or was he two dimensional and boring and not worth all the fuss? It sounds unlikely that two such differing opinions could be held about the same character, but it was a fairly even divide, both groups feeling as strongly as the other.

 In the end we had to agree to disagree.

We all found the passage which deals with the loss of Dinah’s baby moving. And we were interested in the relationship between the two sisters, perhaps wishing that this could have been further explored.

It is very much a book of its time and class. Most of the characters have no need to earn money or to work. They have servants and even Rickie’s job seems to be a bit of a when-I-feel-like-it affair. They have time on their hands in which to pore over nuances of diction and inflection at a dinner conversation, and to agonise over the state of their hearts.

Helen quotes Gillian Tindall saying that the book was not for the young. But we felt differently. At twenty you might have patience with this level of self-absorption, but ten, twenty, thirty years down the line some of us felt we wanted to tell them to pull themselves together and get on with life.

Anna, May 2005