A choice of first novels | 27 March 2010

Catharine is a middle-class, married woman in her late thirties living in a genteel village an hour from London with her husband, a successful lawyer, who nicknames her ‘Catch’.

Catharine is a middle-class, married woman in her late thirties living in a genteel village an hour from London with her husband, a successful lawyer, who nicknames her ‘Catch’. Though educated and bright, she has no career. She is ‘famous’ for her ‘lack of sense of humour’ and is ‘the most feminine woman’ her husband has ever known.

Simon Robson’s novel spans one rainy winter day in Catch’s life, in which she spends the morning drinking tea and worrying about her frustrated musical ambitions, her marriage and her failure to get pregnant, and the afternoon being shouted at by her neighbours and best friend. The debt to Mrs Dalloway is clear, but Robson doesn’t even allow himself the diversion of a party. It is as if he has dared himself to come up with the least showy protagonist and slowest plot possible in order that Catch may stand or fall on prose quality alone.

Robson does write well. Catch’s reflections on her world are finely teased out in his precise, poetic prose and she is a well-drawn if irritating character. As the novel progressed I could understand why everyone who came into contact with her super-sensitivity and modest high-mindedness was roused to ire. Stop mithering and just get on with things, I wanted to shout, at both Robson and his leading lady.

Another passive character, this time male, is the focus of Michael Nath’s La Rochelle. Like Catch, Dr Mark Chopra, a neurologist in a central London hospital, is stymied by overthinking. The emotional heart of his life is his intense friendship with Ian and Laura, a faintly mysterious couple he first met at a party several years earlier.