Jane Austen with Fangs

On a friend’s recommendation I got a couple of novels out of the library by Ivy Compton-Burnett. I had vaguely heard of her, thought she was vaguely Victorian in the same generally vague way that Edith Wharton might be (I’d say this with more authority if I’d ever read Edith Wharton, which is my loss, I’m sure).

I’ve finished one of the novels — The Mighty and their Fall — and started a second, and I’ve just never read anything like this.

The characters speak (and there is no description, or narrative, at all: these could easily be one-act plays) what they feel, all the time. It’s mostly not edifying. (Especially when children speak, unedited despite the best efforts of governesses — they are monsters.) Raw, sparse, cruel, ironic, and ultimately sort of hopeless. The house — a decaying Victorian estate — is a character in the Edwardian background, a menacing presence that somehow affects the plights of the family members busily ripping one another apart, watched by one or two servants. (I think I now know where the idea for Gosford Park may have originated.)

Compton-Burnett has been described, I’ve discovered, as post-Impressionist, and as a torchbearer for the Nouveaux Romanciers. It seems ghastly to read this stuff at all, and if I were less honest than her characters I might mumble about the chronicling of the busting open of the British class system. But in fact it’s riveting, this kind of voyeurism. I’m mesmerized. If I’m honest.

What is so astonishing, though, is the way the two worlds collide: the brutality of honesty, definitely post-World-War-One, juxtaposed with the veneer of pre-war respectability of diction. It seems so seamless. This is how it comes across as so very modern. It almost makes me want to some try and imagine the households of my great-grandparents, overlaying the stuffy syntax with what little I know to have been the quasi-sordid truths about their financial and personal dealings. It has me thinking deeply about what their world must really have been like, rather than what I can see in photographs. What must have been spoken about at luncheons, and what must have been avoided, the big silence as eloquent as any effusion…