Wednesday, 29 January 2025

Review: Re-re-read According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge

 I’ve not been one to re-read books on the whole, but I’ve just re-re-read According to Queeney. This is even stranger because it’s not a book I’ve ever particularly loved, yet it’s one that’s often had an important part in my life. It was one of my earlier jaunts into the eighteenth century, reading it first ( I think) in 2009 and then as the first book of the Dr Johnson’s House Reading Circle in 2015. 

When I was struck with the notion that I could write a novel about Samuel Johnson and his younger brother, Nathaniel, I could use Beryl Bainbridge’s work as a reference point. My book is (at present, I’m still in the first draft) called According to Natty. Finding myself caught in the weeds of my own work a little, I thought I’d read According to Queeney with the intention of seeing what lessons it could teach me about my own work, and perhaps decipher why I’ve always been a little lukewarm about it despite it being almost tailor-made to  my interests.

The book tells the story of Samuel Johnson’s relationship with the Thrale family during the latter years of his life. It’s structured into seven chapters of between 20-40 pages which deal with events in a year or two of that relationship. The book is told in a third-person perspective, not an omniscient one, but tied to a character, yet it could detach and pass from character to character at any time. 

I became a little obsessed with tracking this point of view because it seemed to go all over the place. Each chapter seemed to have a primary point of view, whether it was Mrs Desmoulins in the first, Mrs Salusbury in the second or Queeney in the third but it had no loyalty to tha character and would pass off from one to another and maybe again back to the primary. In dinner party scenes, or occasions where there were lots of characters it would almost be anchored to the table and pass around, dipping in and out of people as it went. It was smoothly done, and the move from one to another was motivated by the ebb and flow of conversation and emotion, but it paradoxically left a lot of the characters feeling flat, like the reader was lightly skimming lots of people.

Interestingly, for a novel called According to Queeney, it’s not often from Queeney’s perspective. The older Queeney delivers a brusque letter after each chapter, where she describes what she remembers now. These are often in contrast to the supposedly ‘true’ depictions within the chapters themselves. Queeney develops (but tries to hide) her suspicions that Samuel and Hester’s relationship was more physical than emotional and she forgets things like her own loosing of an amber necklace and stealing of a replacement. These add ambiguity to the chapters themselves, as well as providing useful skims over time to set up the next one. 

My own novel also adopts a third-person perspective which, although being a little elastic, is tethered to Nathaniel, the person the book is ‘According to’. I really liked when Beryl Bainbridge did stick with Queeney, her confusion (and at times disgust) at the strange goings-on of the adults in her life was really interesting. I liked that she very much had her own goals and motivations. I loved her simple, positive relationship with her father, a man who is a bit of an idiot in many representations of the Thrale set, but whose straightforward love for Queeney makes him seem more grown up than the self-absorbed Hester and Samuel.

Queeney also goes on a few little adventures of her own, like the time she wanders out and finds the ‘mad’ girl in the church who steals her necklace. It’s a good reminder to give Nathaniel a life away from his to-be famous brother, even if s positive relationship with him is one of his desires.

I remembered the book as being a miserable one, but with a sense of farce and was very surprised that it’s only the second chapter that really deals with comic misunderstandings (though the book in general seems to be about different understandings and interpretations - hence the roaming POV I suppose). In this chapter, Samuel thinks Mrs Salusbury is peeing in the garden, thinks he sees a man drowning in the duckpond and strips off to save him, and is mistaken by Mrs Salusbury for a ghost. I’d have liked a little more of this stuff.

That’s also the chapter that introduces the buttons with dogs on them and the fan, which are turned into a ghost story by Samuel. The buttons are then a source of different memories when Queeney remembers being forcibly slapped for playing with them, but Hester remembers her choking on them. There’s then a portrait in Lichfield of a man missing a button and this gets tied into it somehow, it’s all very mysterious.

The subject of my book is Nathaniel Johnson, and he’s mentioned a few times in this one. There’s a story about him as a child falling down some stairs, blaming Samuel for the injury and Samuel being punished for it. There are also suggestions of Nathaniel being chained as a madman and possibly killing himself. I’d like to know where Beryl Bainbridge got these ideas from, I imagine she made them up as my research hasn’t pointed to anything in these directions.

A quick glance at user reviews of this book suggests that many readers had a problem with all the names thrown up in it. Not only are there the key characters of Samuel, Hester, Queeney and such, but there are also the people who shared a house with Samuel, the circles of friends they mention, the people those circles of friends gossip about, various staff and employees - lots of people. What’s more, circling in and around their viewpoints and thought processes muddles them up further. While I want to convey an entire small town on characters and a world beyond it, I plan to make my focus the four members of the Johnson family and hope my readers feel part of it.

I suppose the lesson I chiefly learned was to trust my own instincts in the structuring and viewpoint of my novel. I’m telling a different story, with different characters and am, myself a different person - so there’s nothing wrong with telling it differently. 



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