"Crusoe's Daughter" by Jane Gardam

The English novelist Jane Gardam (1928-2025) sadly died in April this year at the ripe old age of ninety-six. Her novel 'Old Filth', the latter word being an acronym for 'Failed in London Try Hong Kong', originally published in 2004, was one of my favourite pandemic reads, along with its two sequels.

This spring marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of an earlier book, 'Crusoe's Daughter', which is equally pleasurable, charming and original in many ways. It is almost a whole life novel, although with its protagonist's middle age largely missing from the narrative.

She is one Polly Flint who was born in 1899 and was thus obliged to live through the various horrors of the first half of the Twentieth Century. The reference to Robinson Crusoe is partly to do with her status as an orphaned child brought up by aunts and hence to an extent 'marooned' from an early age.

The novel concerns her successful negotiation of this situation. The title is also a reference to Polly's favourite book and this novel ends rather quaintly with these two fictional characters - an aged Polly and Robinson Crusoe - having a conversation with one another. The novel is mainly set close to the North East coast in Durham where Polly lives in a ‘yellow house’, but this is no local story. Two world wars happen and echoes of Empire abound, alongside social change of course. It is undemanding and very pleasurable. This is my favourite quote. Such lovely writing. It is Polly's thinking as she prepares her first lesson as a new teacher::

"I would begin by discussing the concept of the novel: the English novel, how it had emerged from jumbled and simplistic sources some three hundred years ago into the literary form we now recognise, its purpose to give solace and simultaneously to disturb; though its true genesis lies deep within man himself, in his urge to tell a tale. I would describe how, as blobs of jelly and the flat ribbons in the sea became fish, became birds, became mammals and intricate man, so the grunts and the snuffles of the cave became anecdote, joke, tale, tale set to music, saga, song-cycle and glorious traveller's tale. And then arose Defoe from the smelly streets of London, honest man (and criminal) prolific genius (and hack) to produce the great curiosity, the extraordinary masterpiece, the paradigm, Robinson Crusoe itself, the novel elect, fully realised and complete like the child Athene springing from the head of the rough god Zeus..... Every serious novel must in some degree be 'novel'. To survive - like the bloc in the ocean, the seed, it must hold in itself some fibrous quality, catch some seemingly preposterous new quality, catch some unnoticed angle of light - and unselfconsciously. It may fail - but better to be sorry than safe. All the time it must entertain. No polemics. No camouflaged sermons."