Not quite as we like it

‘What you will’ has a Shakespearean ring to it. It is, after all, the second part of the title of Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night. It suggests romance. And comedy; a little mayhem, girls dressing up as boys, and vice versa. Possibly on an island.

Alas there are no cakes and ale in What You Will, Katherine Bucknell’s third novel, set mainly in Hamersmith, W14. More  sackcloth and ashes. Recalling her days at Oxford, American Gwen pictures people fondly, ‘toiling towards some unspecified advancement in their woollen suits, woollen skirts, woollen tights, and over the top their black gowns’. She ‘relished the atmosphere of difficulty, of chill, of foreboding’. 

Unsurprisingly perhaps, she married her tutor, Classics Fellow Lawrence Phillips, whose idea of a good time is a period of quiet with Petronius and Victor Hugo, on whom he is writing a comparative study. A visit to Les Mis is his dirty little secret, and not just because he went with his mistress. Dinner chez eux has an air of the tutorial: ‘Jean Valjean keeps the bishop’s candlesticks, despite the risk that they will eventually reveal his criminal past’, Lawrence goes on, ‘just as Trimalchio — you know the Satyricon too, I suppose, Hilary? Being a classicist?’

Luckily, Hilary has been hard at work on a vast collection of classical antiquities, belonging to Edward Doro. Doro has died, leaving her responsible for the collection, and motivating a little plot. Having been swindled out of her role as curator by her ex-fiancé, sackcloth and ashes are now about all that Hilary has left: a suitcase of Doro’s files. Everything else is in binliners, in the basement of Mark’s apartment. ‘It’s been pretty damn cold for the past five weeks without my winter clothes’, she says.