The Years

If I’m honest, I’m not Virginia Woolf’s biggest fan.  Or any kind of fan of hers.  In fact, I’m a little of the opinion that her suicide note was the best thing she ever wrote.  It’s wonderfully poignant.  I’d heard bad things about her for quite a while, but after reading (and loving) Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, I decided to give her a go.  Mistake.  I was horribly disappointed by Mrs Dalloway and Orlando is quite frankly ridiculous.  Nonetheless, third time being the charm, I embarked upon The Years (if not with a fully open mind) and it’s kind of… really good.

The book tells the story of the Pargiter family between 1985 and 1930.  Or, at least that’s what the blurb on the edition I got from the library proclaims.  In reality, it tells mundane events in the lives of a few of the seven Pargiter children, their cousins, their children and their cousins’ children.  It largely skips the major events of the time period in favour of focusing on dinner parties and trips to the country.

And okay, Woolf could tell the story of the characters in a far more comprehensive way- one character (Delia Pargiter) disappears for years, cropping up only in the odd obscure reference to how she is handling the death of a character who is never introduced.  Similarly her brother Edward and sister Milly slip out of the narrative after the first chapter only to appear at a raucous family reunion in the last.  But the fragmented storyline works.  Once you accept that this is not the story of a family over forty-odd years, it’s the inconsequential moments within that story, the book becomes completely enjoyable.  As long as the reader is happy to fill in the dramatic events (the births, marriages, deaths and the heartbreaks) that we know must happen in between.

I’m ridiculously gone for this book.  I even like the way Woolf won’t shut up about the bloody smog.  In a way that’s severely reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock it’s always coming along and interrupting the story, creeping about and wrapping itself around buildings.  It’s almost completely unnecessary, I think.  And yet; I want to say it adds a certain je ne sais quoi to proceedings, but it doesn’t add a thing.  Atmosphere, maybe.  The best I can say for it is it is appropriate.  The novel completely fails to have a plot as is conventionally understood and Woolf’s obsession with the weather is just another (utterly British) method of focusing on the minutiae. 

My next book will be Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man.  And, as I’m only 90 pages or so in, it may be some time.