The Professor of Poetry is a hymn to Oxford, a city of books, light and stone; to academic life; a thesis on poetry in itself. It doesn't say it's Oxford but one would be surprised if it wasn't. Or perhaps, in the end, not quite a hymn but a critique.
The Professor of Poetry is Elizabeth Stone, distinguished and devoted to her work if unworldly at the same time. She is middle-aged when she becomes ill but needs to spend time in Oxford to work on some papers of T.S. Eliot's. Her tutor from her days as a brilliant student, Edward Hunt, is still teaching there, scruffy, smoking and sometimes swearing.
The story conceals more secrets than it ever answers- like Elizabeth's relationship with her mother, what really happened at the concert thirty years earlier when she felt sick and what the relationship between Elizabeth and Edward had ever been. Elizabeth is something of a case study of various dysfunctions, one of which is the interesting condition of apparently not liking music.
The early chapters move slowly and one wonders how Grace McCleen can keep up the descriptions of the world of books lit by early evening light for quite so long without anything happening but as the novel develops and quickens to its climax it gains power and becomes very moving in the way that the intellectual ideas in poetry can become emotional, going beyond words and meaning. And yet, academic work isn't sufficient and perhaps it ultimately fails when Elizabeth finally makes her way through crisis into something more 'real'.
Grace McCleen's writing is spectacularly good in places and goes subtly unnoticed in others which is always a sign of top quality. Surely there is a pastiche of Virginia Woolf in one part; it finds perfect pitch in its descriptions in others and finally is paced with all the panache of a Dick Francis thriller. An interest in poetry would help in reading this, her second novel, but it is a beautiful thing by any standards and will make a wonderful film, I'm sure.
If I enjoy any other novel half as much for the rest of the year, I'll be happy with that. Her first novel, The Land of Decoration, has been ordered and is on its way here right now, I hope.
