Discussion thread for "The Heyday" by Bamber Gascoigne

[julesjones]

Back in July I reviewed "The Heyday" by Bamber Gascoigne, and you can find the review on LibraryThing as well as on my assorted blogs. However, I had to be careful about spoilers in the review, which prevented me from discussing it in as much depth as I'd like. Since at least one of my friends has now read it as well, I'm opening a comments thread for spoilerific discussion of the book. I hope to be back later today with my own more detailed thoughts, but comments are welcome now if anyone wants to start the ball rolling.

Comments

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

I think my condensed review would be 'a bunch of unlikeable people turn out to be unreliable narrators'. I'd guessed that Meredith would turn out to be more than he appeared but I didn't expect quite so many twists at the end.

[julesjones]

One of the things I found fascinating about it was that it is quite clearly signalled at the beginning of the book that you are dealing with multiple layers of unreliable narration, but Gascoigne does it in such a way that it's very easy not to pay attention to the implications until you get to the end and that second bombshell explodes. And I couldn't talk explicitly about this in the review, because it would have involved serous spoilers.

Benjy explicitly says that he's editing the material to create what he considers to be an interesting narrative, so you know you are already seeing the story through the filter he has imposed on his source material, both as story craft and because he understands some but not all of what he's reading. And underneath that there's the filter created by what Agnes has chosen to write about her experiences, and the filter created by what Edward has chosen to photograph and what Agnes has selected to keep from his output.

There is a fairly major clue in the text that what Agnes writes about the sex scene is completely and utterly unreliable -- and I missed it the first time I read the book. The diary entry is quite clearly composed in hindsight, but Benjy's own mental filters colour how he presents it, and he does not realise that it's pure fantasy, because it fits the story he's built in his mind.

Obviously the book reads very differently on re-reading, when you can see what's going on underneath the surface. It's a fascinating study of the use of unreliable narration, because there's effectively more than one unreliable narrator, and their motives are different. I don't have any sense of Benjy being deliberately deceptive towards his potential readers, other than censoring his memoir because he doesn't want to shock his grandmother. But you're left with a sense that Agnes was deliberately deceiving someone, even if only herself. Though she does tell Benjy to ask Meredith, so perhaps she intended Benjy to know the truth, or at least some approximation of it.

[julesjones]

As Stevie notes above, the characters are often unlikeable. Yet I still find them sympathetic, even while occasionally deploring their behaviour. The Edwardian characters can be self-centred and often cruel about other people, but they mostly try to get by in life without being cruel to other people. In various ways they don't quite fit into the pigeonholes available to them in their particular society, and it's fun watching them moving into the sub-culture of rep theatre as a way of expressing themselves. I don't know how historically accurate Gascoigne's depiction of that world is, but he puts in a lot of interesting world-building detail without it feeling to me like info-dumping.

One aspect of the book I find interesting, particularly given the period it was written and published in, is the handling of LGBT themes. You know fairly early in the book that Benjy isn't straight. As the story develops, it becomes clear to Benjy that Agnes and Jimmy are competing for more than Edward's platonic attention, and that Agnes is not aware of this (or in light of later developments, does not wish any potential audience to be aware of it). The initial twist in the resolution to the "why does Agnes marry Benjy's grandfather?" storyline makes it look as if the bisexual/gay men are at best careless of Agnes's feelings, and at worst that Edward is an unscrupulous user. Standard anti-bi stereotyping, in other words. But the final twist in the storyline sheds an entirely different light on what happened. Edward has not deceived Agnes, and Agnes has to some extent deceived the two men. And much, much later, the grandson who has read her diary in all too credulous a frame of mind. Gascoigne has used his unreliable narrators to first invoke a reader's prejudice, and then flip around the situation and make the reader question their initial reaction. And it's quite deliberate, so far as I can see.

The end of the story is, alas, a sad one for the gay couple. But it's not in a "gays can't have a happy ending" way, simply a reflection on what happened to Edwardians during the Great War.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

The end of the story is, alas, a sad one for the gay couple. But it's not in a "gays can't have a happy ending" way, simply a reflection on what happened to Edwardians during the Great War.

I think that was the only way their story could have ended in the context. Both because of the high chance that it would have happened taht way, and to have a reason for Meredith to be part of the household.

On a related note, I'm wondering whether Benjy was completely unaware of Meredith's sexuality because of the status difference, or whether it was a result of their respective personalities. This thought-process being particularly relevant when considering the attitude of my later C20th characters towards the concept of their (former) servants having a life that doesn't revolve around the family.

[julesjones]

Sorry it's taken so long to reply.

I think there are several things going on with Benjy's blindness to Meredith's sexuality. There's definitely an element of "one's servants just don't *do* that", which Benjy explicitly refers to (and one of the things I like about Benjy is that he recognises and acknowledges his hypocrisy in this). Another is simply the age difference; Meredith has always been an old man in all the time Benjy has known him, and there's the usual belief of the young that they invented sex. And since Meredith has a slight element of "father figure" for Benjy, that's probably even stronger than it would be for random old man in his social contacts.

One thing that strikes me is that because of the way Benjy's been brought up mostly by his grandmother and her servants, he probably does have rather old-fashioned notions by the standards of his own generation and class about the relationship between servants and family.

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

More well thought-out analysis there, nevermind about the wait. Those are all perfectly understandable reasons for Benji's thought processes, especially when put together. I need to ponder this more...