In summer, and particularly when the wind blows from the south-west across the lawn, the septic tank gives out a strong stench, and guests move uneasily nearer the house. ‘Oh, it is a body,’ the girls say. ‘We have a body in there, no one you know. It decomposes, of course, but so slowly one quite despairs.’
John Bowen’s The Girls is subtitled ‘A Story of Village Life’ and if it weren’t for the macabre note struck by its first chapter, “The Septic Tank,” you might read quite far in it and think it was exactly that: whimsical, often comical, sketches of life in the country, the sort of thing its second chapter, “The Day the Pig Escaped,” both promises and, hilariously, delivers.
“The girls” are Janet and Susan, who live quite happily together in their cottage producing and creating most of what they sell in their village shop and at local craft fairs: honey, elderflower wine, embroidered smocks:
So it had gone for seven years. Consciously or unconsciously, the girls had fashioned a way of life which was as intricate as the web of any spider, the nest of any wren, and of which the purpose was not much to do with self-sufficiency of sweeping a room for anyone’s laws, but was a framework which would allow them to live together without hindrance and without being bored.
It’s all very wholesome and joyful—until one day Susan starts to wonder “What am I doing?” She needs something more, or at least she needs to try something else. She decides to take a solo vacation to Crete.
Left behind, Jan falls into a spiral of doubt, becoming increasingly convinced that one thing Susan is definitely trying out in Crete is being with a man. She pictures “Susan dancing, Susan laughing, Susan frolicking in waves with others, windsurfing with others, held closely with others.” “Jealousy!” remarks the narrator. “Which of us has not at some time felt it, and been damaged and diminished by it?” In this “damaged” condition, Jan goes off to a craft fair where she and Susan have traditionally gone together to sell their wares, and there she is the one who takes up with a man, Alan, a rabbity (her word!) young maker of early musical instruments. They have sex, which is “a new experience” for Jan:
It was not unpleasant. When she thought of it, it was not all that new. The penis was new, but really it was only another piece of throbbing anatomy, to be felt and stroked.
They part as friends and once Susan is back, she and Janet settle happily back into their routines. And then Janet discovers she is pregnant, and then the girls have a baby, “Butch,” and then Alan comes back . . .
I’m not going to give away any more details of the plot, although it’s really the tone of the novel that makes it so disturbingly delightful, as well as its pleasurably disorienting combination of lovely descriptions of nature, wryly funny accounts of people’s idiosyncrasies, and grim, even grotesque, moments of violence and horror. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that combines quite these ingredients in quite this way. It even, at the very end, allows a moment of pathos, a bit of touching sincerity that makes the insouciance of its previous approach to some pretty morally execrable behavior seem a bit less funny. All this and an Edward Gorey cover! What a treat.
Novel Readings 