Stanley Middleton - A Cautious Approach

Stanley Middleton, A Cautious Approach (Hutchinson)

Stanley Middleton died last year just a few days before his ninetieth birthday. He left his forty-fifth and final novel which advertises on the front cover, 'From the Booker Prize Winning Novelist' and might well add, 'of thirty-six years ago'. For although this is by all means contemporary fiction from a respected author, Middleton's manner seems to come from a now bygone age. That is not necessarily a bad thing but the main character here, George Taylor, is 45 years old and like the friends he makes during the 219 pages, he speaks and acts with a civility and unerring consideration that isn't recognizably typical of anyone I know from my generation. Middleton can't help but write from his own comfortable, highly civilised point of view but perhaps hasn't noticed that most people wouldn't think like George who, having offered both custard and cream to his guests to go with their Christmas pudding, and the lady and Andrew 'confine themselves to custard', partakes of both and feels 'he'd be judged as a sybarite'.

Having had an intended moment of humour on page one, I increasingly had to wonder which of Middleton's linguistic niceties were meant to make me laugh and which were simply his genteel tone and found that I enjoyed it all as the latter while constantly wondering if the book was really set in the twenty-first century or a previous age of greater courtesies.

Middleton's method is to let his characters tell the story, much of it reported from one to another in conversations, sometimes on the telephone, and in lengthy accounts of their back stories and those of others and they are prompted by questions from their interlocutors, which although politely expressed, seem to me sometimes shockingly intrusive.

The characters enjoy each other's company and tell each other so, as well as how interesting they find each other; they make each other happy just by having a conversation, feed each other with delicious, carefully-prepared meals and occasionally chide each other with sharp retorts after perceived indiscretions in sudden changes of mood. It's a comedy of manners in a way but one is never quite sure when to laugh. Even, presumably, in 2009 we are asked to believe than an elderly lady had never got used to using the telephone.

But even though this is an attractively old-fashioned, middle-class world and the action is for the most part, sedate, we still get two deaths, two episodes confronting violent youth and a house fire and one is gradually led into to the story with its slightly creaking devices until it becomes more involving, gathers momentum in its last chapters and eventually proves to be a well-made novel.

Middleton is, in his way, a good painter of character, his story develops and then twists and it is impossible not to have sympathy for the educated postman, George, who can quote Doctor Johnson, Virgil and conveniently shares the author's enthusiasm for classical music and poetry. One does fear somewhat for George's life with Mirabel because the signs are that he's going to be second-in-command in that relationship, but there are men who prefer it that way.

For all that the book assumes that the status of a postman is less than that of a teacher, that people wouldn't be offended at being told quite so frankly what their new friends thought of them, or ask quite such direct questions, it becomes a modestly profound and perceptive story. Although readers new to Middleton might need a while to adjust to his way of writing, it is in the end more fluid and better than it first appears. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I was going to and, hopefully, mostly for the right reasons.