Source of book: Borrowed from the library
Having read Martin Amis recently, I decided to read one by his father, Kingsley Amis as well. I picked up The Folks That Live On The Hill because it looked interesting.
One of Kingsley’s last books, it was written in 1990. While it retains the feel of classic British humor, it also feels very modern in the way society is portrayed - Kingsley has adapted in his own crusty way to changing times.
It is strange how a book can be simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny, gently satirical, and yet achingly sad.
The story centers around Harry Caldecote, and is told mostly from his point of view, although the various other characters get a chapter or two told through their eyes. Harry is a retired (well, mostly retired) librarian looking forward to a quiet life of simple (and affordable pleasures.) But, he finds himself more or less responsible for a cadre of relatives with various issues, and he ends up constantly dragged away from his lunch at the club or his drinks after a long day, or even out of bed with their needs.
First of all, there is his son Piers, who makes his living (such as it is) through activities that are probably not entirely on the up-and-up. A little grift here, a bit of smuggling there - nothing major, but Piers isn’t exactly forthcoming about it.
Then, there is his brother Freddie, a pretty lousy poet, henpecked by his wife Desiree, who probably regrets the marriage (and tends to look back fondly on her brief fling with Harry years before Freddie.)
Harry may have divorced his two ex-wives, but he still is on the hook for a few ex-relatives. Bunty, the daughter of one ex-wife, is a lesbian in a dysfunctional relationship with Popsy - and they both live with Piers, at least for the time being. Oh, and Bunty’s estranged husband, Desmond, is torn between his desire for Bunty (and his belief he can “fix” her sexual orientation), and his relationship with his mistress, who is also the cook at his restaurant.
And then there is Fiona, the niece of his other ex-wife, who is hopelessly alcoholic, and is in and out of rehab as well as hospitals after drinking herself into near-death.
The only relative who is fully functional is his sister Clare, who has moved in with him after the death of her husband. Unfortunately, she has also brought with her said husband’s horrible dog, who she hates but cannot admit it to Harry.
Harry wants to be with his mistress, Maureen, but she seems to be headed toward a reconciliation with her absurdly rich husband. There’s no peace for poor Harry anywhere.
The story takes place in the neighborhood of “Primrose Hill” - a London suburb that isn’t as posh as it once was, but still retains a kind of charm. It closely resembles Kingsley Amis’ own neighborhood, and he might very well be a bit like Harry himself.
As with many places in England (and Europe and the rest of the former colonies), demographics are changing. The Irish have moved in, of course, but also Pakistanis and Jamaicans and a panoply of others. (Delightful in this book are the Pakistani brothers Howard and Charles, who run the combination post office and store, and who pride themselves in being far more “English” than any of the white residents. And they are right about that, actually. The two of them serve as observers of all the craziness around them.) Amis avoids the usual xenophobia that seems to plague so many old white guys - some of his characters are xenophobic, of course, but that is part of the satire.
The book is filled with hilarious lines, and ludicrous situations (although they are all too realistic), and awkward relationships. So why is it also sad? Well, in part, because none of the characters have much hope of a better life. What they have is….what they have. And the dysfunction seems unsolvable.
The most achingly sad passages involve Fiona. The problem is, Amis writes her with far too much knowledge and self-awareness. He too was an alcoholic - Christopher Hitchens described him as often too drunk to stand up. He separated his life to an extent: he wrote before lunch, then started drinking.
So, when Fiona, during a period of sobriety (the latest in a string of them) admits that eventually, she will be back drinking again, it really feels like Amis is expressing his own despair. The fact that these passages are so well written only makes the pain worse.
And man, the writing is really delightful. I think I will avoid giving away any more plot details - and the “plot” is mostly just episodes in the life of Harry and his relations - and just dive into my favorite lines. Here is his description of Freddie, when we first meet him.
He sat placidly next to his wife as if he had not been mentioned at all in any context, blinking and showing his teeth in the way he always did with the look of somebody who had recently had a bright light shone in his face. He also looked vaguely aristocratic, understanding the term to include, indeed stress, things like effeteness and ineffectuality. This went along with a kind of outlandish touch as in some bygone portrait, suggesting the past existence of pioneering vegetarians and other dietetic enthusiasts, minor noblemen who had founded forest communities where women were rumored to be held in common, or simply fellows who had played billiards all day every day for fifty years.
Or this one about Desiree:
Harry took a moment off to consider the odd fact that those totally insensitive to an art so often think it more wonderful, etc., than those who are not.
I also loved this exchange between Harry and Desiree when he gets the call to come retrieve the passed out Fiona from a pub.
“It isn’t as if she’s your daughter,” she said at a fairly early stage.
“Oh yes it is,” he said at once. “In every disagreeable and pestiferous way it’s exactly as if she’s my daughter.”
And, of course, the description of the execrable Towser and Clare’s complicated relationship with him.
Clare Morrison wished Towser no harm in the world, but she ardently and continually longed for his death. He had been Arnold’s dog, which in the way of married men’s dogs mean that the man concerned had chosen, paid for, and named him, always spoken of him as “his” dog, often addressed him in a hearty tone of voice, seldom taken him out and never done a blessed hand’s turn about his bed, coat, messes, food, water. Conscience and pity had been enough to make her bring him here (where else?) after his master’s death and see to it since then that he had as good a life as was reasonably possible in a crowded suburb for a creature who ought to have been running about on a chilly mountainside. That much took quite enough out of her, but could largely be done on automatic; what really got her down was the strain of pretending to Harry that she liked the bloody animal.
Some of the descriptions are just so unexpected.
Further down towards the underground station, only a couple of hundred yards away, there stood a very serious-looking municipal block made of a material resembling petrified porridge.
Then there is the hilarious riff on Harry’s reading - his attempt to “delibrarianize” himself a bit. And gain some material for small talk at his club.
Harry sat reading a well-documented, cogently argued attack on the training methods that had produced the new generation of British hairdressers, whom the writer pronounced to be a disgrace to a civilized country and a substantial cause of our diminished cultural standing among the nations of the world. Mrs. Thatcher, he went on, had defeated the miners’ and the printers’ leaders, but unaccountably left on their perch the little Hitlers of the hairdressing union, an omission which if not repaired in time would cost her his vote at the next General Election.
One of the brilliant set-pieces is the visit by the siblings - Clare, Freddie, and Harry - to their aged mother. For Freddie, it is a brief chance to be away from Desiree. For the others, a bit of a slog. Clare and Harry are a hilarious couple, honestly, throughout the book.
“It still doesn’t seem much return for Mum having her house occupied for several hours.”
“That’s all you’d get out of it yourself, agreed, the sheer power thing. But try and look at it from her point of view.”
“Oh Christ, must I? You know how I hate doing that. Even trying. From anybody’s not just hers, though hearse more than most, admitted.”
“Very short-sighted. The usual result of looking at something from someone else’s point of view is to see how much worse off they are than you. Can be quite cheering actually.”
“And bloody quit philosophizing. I can’t take it at this hour of the morning and it makes you sound like a wife. I’ve told you before.”
“In the sense you mean there never was a man who needed a wife more than you. But don’t let’s squabble, dear.”
And then there is the funny only because it is pathetic and sad tale of Desmond and his drunken attempt to get Bunty back. She locks herself in the bathroom, and Harry - of course - is called, and has to fix things. Again.
“And I said, I’ve come to take my rights.”
“How did you actually put it? I mean, did you actually say to her in so many words, ‘Bunty, I’ve come to take my rights’?”
“Of course not.” For the first time a shade of real anger touched Desmond’s face as the wing of the ridiculous brushed at the edge of his mind. “There are other ways of putting these things to people.”
“Like trying to rape them, you mean? I’m sure you’ve tried much gentler ways of taking your rights off Bunty without getting anywhere either. And she’s no flyweight, our Bunty. You wouldn’t even get her bloody legs apart unless you laid her out half cold, which you’d find quite enough of a proposition on its own, as you know well without being told. I’ll bet you didn’t have that little red mark under your jaw when you came in, correct? All this is ridiculous and you know it and the sooner you admit it the sooner we can get Bunty out of the bathroom and all have a nice chat and go home.”
“The wing of the ridiculous brushed at the edge of his mind” is such an outstanding and astonishingly great line.
After this comes Harry’s more or less successful attempt to get Desmond to understand sexual orientation. Desmond is, ironically, the old school sort who believes that there is, somewhere deep inside every lesbian, a desire to fuck a man. If only he could figure out how to release that.
It is the older Harry (and remember, Kingsley Amis was born in 1922 - my grandparents’ age!) who gets it, and uses the analogy of Desmond’s friend and idol from his school days. That Bunty liked Desmond enough to marry him isn’t enough to form the basis of a true romantic and sexual partnership.
Note here: the fact that someone born more than 100 years ago could understand this is pretty proof positive that it isn’t that anti-LGBTQ bigots are old. It is that they choose to be bigots. Amis is clearly satirizing people who refuse to understand diversity throughout the book, not at all in a preachy way, but just by showing how ridiculous bigotry really looks from the outside.
In yet another irony here, Amis was in many ways a conservative at this point in his life. Yet he can poke fun at Thatcherites and xenophobes and homophobes just fine. Or even just the ways people respond to changing social mores. Here is another example. Harry gets a potential job offer in the wilds of America near the Canadian border - an offer he considers accepting.
“What are these things in Amerindic you’ll be expected to take an interest in?” asked Clare.
“Oh, don’t. Presumably things to do with Amerinds, taking the adjective as a classy variant on Amerindian. Which is what a few ordinary Americans call Red Indians to make them feel less genocidal about them. Assuagement of guilt and all that. It’s a fairly long story.”
There is a back story here, of course. The term “Amerindian” is a portmanteau coined around 1902, and used pretty exclusively within academic circles. It was controversial from the start, and is pretty much limited in present use to parts of Canada and the Caribbean. Which means it is a prime target for satire - after all, Harry would be working in the very sort of academic setting where the term would be used, and I can see why Amis couldn’t resist poking fun at it and doing some wordplay with the conjugations.
In the same conversation, Harry worries that the legendary friendliness of Americans (um…) will impinge on his introversion.
“You’ll soon get over all that. You won’t find any difficulty in making yourself - not disagreeable, that’s not your way - unagreeable enough to the neighbors to clunk their sociability for good and all.”
The next line is a bit of a spoiler - although it should be obvious that Harry isn’t really going to pack up and move to America. Clare doesn’t want him to leave, even though she feels irritated at him a lot of the time.
“What can I say? My life is here with you and you’re awful, you’re everything I said about you but you’re family and I’m used to you, and you know I don’t think anybody in the world understands as well as I do how important it is to be used to someone. Of course you know yourself it’s not a question of replacing Arnold in any way at all but nobody could replace a child or your best friend or anybody else either and that’s not a good reason for not having anybody anywhere ever again.”
Clare, of course, as a woman of a certain age surrounded by men of the same certain age, is a bit tired of being the one to clean things up after them. But she knows she is still going to do it. Eventually, Fiona manages to get hit by a truck - a bit different from her usual way of ending up in the hospital. Harry and Clare are the first ones called - of course. She ends up arguing with a dumb-ass man about what to do with Fiona.
“Can’t they at least sit her up?” someone asked.
“No point in sitting up a person in a fit,” she said.
“That’s what it is, eh?” asked the man.
“Well, it’s not an attack of the twitches, is it?” she asked him, with just a touch of that primeval contempt, of the basic human type for the variant, perhaps in some way that told of the superiority and seniority of the sex that has always had to do the rough work, the real work, the clearing up of the sick and the shit and the afterbirth and the dead bodies while the men think and create art. “She’s warm enough and that’s all we can do for her for the moment. What she needs is an ambulance.”
That’s perceptive stuff right there. And here’s the kicker: by this time, Amis’ kids had made arrangements for him to live with his ex-wife and her new husband, so someone would take care of him in his increasingly drunken old age. So much self-awareness combined with a complete inability to escape his demons.
As it turns out, the ambulance is a long way away, and they realize it is quicker to just transport her to the hospital themselves. For those of us who are automobile enthusiasts, there is a lovely reference to a “Shooting Brake” at this point. Feel free to go down that rabbit hole if you like.
This incident, of course, takes place in front of the imperturbable Charles and Howard. Amis takes a dig at racist yahoos in this scene as well.
“Your lot’ll be taking over running the whole bloody country soon,” said one of the bare-armed yobbos from the antiquarian bookshop, sounding fairly neutral about this project.
“Well, with the kind of competition that’s on offer from some of the locals,” said Howard as lightly as anybody could have asked for, “that shouldn’t be such an impossibly difficult job.”
Charles manages to rescue the situation just before the locals figure out the insult.
Near the end, Piers, who managed to get a bit of a loan from Clare, pays her back with a bit of extra. Earlier, he gave a whole song and dance to Harry to try to get a bit off of him. Piers’ analysis of the situation is amusing, even if it isn’t entirely accurate.
“Well, you see, he’d sooner have a petty criminal or a gambler for a son, or think he had one, than a gay. You’re a bit the same - I hinted at all sorts of unspeakable depravities to get some money to put on a horse. Which incidentally finished fifth. I doubt if you would have given it to me if I’d told you what it was for. But Dad’s much worse. Colossal puritan about money among other things. In fact he puritanicised himself out of a small fortune just the other day.”
Knowing Harry, he probably doesn’t care if Piers is gay (he likely isn’t, but Piers uses that as a tool), and it is never clear exactly what Piers did to make the money - and he isn’t going to tell either.
The book ends with Clare and her memories of her late husband, and it is a lovely melancholy picture.
At such moments she could not so much see him clearly as remember his look, or rather the expression of his she had been fondest of. She had almost never seen it direct because it would change as soon as he caught her looking back at him - in his way he had been a self-conscious man. That look, with slightly lowered eyelids and slightly parted lips, had been a little cool and a little amused and had said in a way that no one could doubt that of course others were fond of her and might even love her in their way but only he loved and understood her all through and knew everything about her. Most people, she supposed, had never had anything like that in their lives at all, and she knew she should count herself luckier than them whatever happened or might happen to anybody at any stage, but all she could do was miss it and rest in the knowledge that in a few moments the memory would fade until the next time.
That’s incredible writing, and such bittersweetness.
I will say, this book wasn’t entirely what I expected, but it had more depth to it than mere humor, and a lot to say about the messiness of real human relationships.
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