Pastoral

    

    If you've enjoyed Sue Gee's The Mysteries of Glass and Earth and Heaven, then Judith Allnatt's The Poet's Wife is surely a book to look out for, having that same stillness, balance and sustained expressive quality. If I were to liken it to a piece of music to best describe its nature it would be Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending, at times serene, melancholic, always evocative.

   The story of the poet John Clare and his decline into madness is here told by his wife, Patty. In 1841 in rural Northamptonshire, Patty finds her husband by the roadside, footsore and confused. He has walked eighty miles from the asylum to which he had been committed four years earlier, his leaving an act of will, but far from being well he still suffers manic episodes and delusions so that while his family is glad to have him back, life is far from easy.

    Over the course of the next few months and with dwindling resources Patty tries to manage home and children, her hard work and good intentions undermined by the increasingly erratic John. As she tells the story of their present hardships, so she looks back to earlier days, courtship and marriage, a time of hope when John Clare the 'peasant poet' achieved fame and patronage.

    Patty is open and generous of heart, clear-sighted, strong and a realist. For John, his illness "unpicked the cloth of his mind and worked it through with random threads, leaving it flawed and altered, so that the portrait of his true self was obscured, a faint outline that even he could no longer discern."

   This is a sad book, but a beautiful one, crafted with skill and an obvious affinity for subject and characters. I recommend it thoroughly, and am minded now to read Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze which covers John Clare's years in the asylum - but might it break the spell Judith Allnatt has cast?

Comments

[Verity]

I *do* like Sue Gee and have just read The quickening maze which I thought excellent, so think I must definitely add this to my wishlist!

[Danielle]

I loved Sue Gee's book, so I will have to be on the lookout for this one as well.

[LizF]

I read Judith Alnatt's previous book A Mile of River and loved it partly because I remember the long hot summer of 1976 very well as I was around the same age as the teenage main character. It is very sad too but with an element of hopefulness.
I haven't read any of Sue Gee's books despite having both those you mentioned on my shelves but by the sound of things I should dust them off forthwith!

[Cornflower]

Indeed you should, Liz!