Caroline Moore

Time is the essence

It may be middle-class and middle-aged, but it’s still a great novel

Tessa Hadley is not the sort of writer to land the Booker Prize, which tends to reward writers from ‘anywhere’ rather than ‘somewhere’. Hadley labours under perceived limitations: she is distinctively British, writes about the middle classes, and turns out, as the puff on the back rightly says, ‘the quintessential domestic novel’.

Those who are put off by this description — probably mostly men — miss out on a vast range of female authors, from Jane Austen to Anne Tyler. Poor souls, they are missing

only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its vanities, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

That just about sums up Tessa Hadley.

Her subversive wit is Austenesque; but in many ways she is more like Tyler. Her novels span decades of change. Time itself is a plot-driver — if plot is not too definite a word. Every character is carefully sited on their time lines. These are novels not just of ‘somewhere’, but ‘some-when’: in this, she is reminiscent of Chekhov, in whose plays every character is given an exact age.

Late in the Day, as the title suggests, is again about time — in this case, 30 years of marriage. A long marriage needs to encompass change: ‘Since that beginning, they had both changed their skins so often. Marriage simply meant that you hung on to each other through the succession of metamorphoses. Or failed to.’

The opening is delicately ominous. ‘They were listening to music when the phone rang.’ ‘They’ are married couple Christine and Alexandr: Christine does not recognise the music; ‘Alex had chosen it, he hadn’t consulted her, and now she stubbornly wouldn’t ask — he took too much pleasure in knowing what she didn’t know.’

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