The skin chairs (original 1962; edition 1962)

This novel contains many of the ingredients I've come to recognize as typical of much of Barbara Comyns's work: a rural setting, a large family with lots of children, children left to their own devices, a mother who can't cope, lovely descriptions of nature and animals, demanding and conventional relatives, eccentric characters, weird and unsettling accidents and deaths. And yet, it is different in some ways too: longer, more complex, and more containing more character growth and even happiness. The novel takes its title from a set of chairs in the home of a neighboring general, chairs covered with human skin. The narrator, 10-year-old Frances (but clearly looking back when she is older), is both horrified and fascinated by them, wondering about the people whose skin was used. Although they only appear on a few occasions in the book, they serve as a metaphor throughout. Of course, what's always typical of Comyns's work is her psychological perceptiveness and her eye for character and natural detail. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Narrated in the first person by Frances, aged 11, the fourth child in a family of six, The Skin Chairs begins when she is visiting her stuffy Aunt and Uncle Lawrence; while she is there, her father dies and the family is catapulted into penury. With the Lawrence's help (the kind with humiliating strings attached) they move into a small house near the Lawrences and try to live economically. In the chaos, Frances, not quite one of the little ones and not quite grown-up, falls through the cracks and the novel recounts the events of the year and a half or so, of intermittent boredom and knocking about, and her involvement with several adults. Frances is observant and dreamy, sensitive, but also somewhat passive and empathic, very vulnerable to being used by adults. She becomes obsessed with a set of chairs, made in Africa of the skins of men, horrible souvenirs of a conflict, that are to be found in a neighboring estate. She also becomes involved with a young and beautiful widow with a baby that is being neglected to the point of abuse but for whom Frances feels great affection. She is also allowed by misplaced kindness on her mother's part, to spend time with an elderly lady who is, in fact, not charmingly eccentric but quite mad and dangerous. The six chairs make manifest the utter helplessness and heartlessness of human beings and their sombre menace is a thread running through book - resolved for Frances only at the very end.

Sometimes the better a novel is, the harder it is to know how to describe it, evaluate it or even summarize it. Frances is a convincing narrator, all the characters, even quite minor ones are vivid. The story unfolds with seeming randomness, which, as you near the end, you realize was always leading to one destination. There are many very funny passages (the governesses who always start every sentence with the words, "My father always...." or "My brother always") -- passages that also reveal the bitterness the governesses have to swallow working for others, not quite servants, not quite family. Up early "Except for the birds it was completely quiet in the garden as I stood there watching the sky lighten in sudden waves. The leaves on our tree were drooping, but, as the sun began to rise, the leaves rose too. It was as if they were waking up and breathing." "The room had a sickly smell of caged birds and spiteful women..." The novel does end 'happily' - and perhaps that is why it is not more highly regarded, but I felt the reprieve was earned and even appropriate, as part of Comyn's point that twists and turns of fortune cannot be predicted. ( )

Wasn't quite sure what to make of this novel. I think it is a children's novel, about a girl who with her family suffers a reversal of fortune and becomes poor, relying on help from a ghastly aunt until her mother remarries at the end of the novel.

It's written well and I enjoyed it, but wonder if had I been younger, would have enjoyed it more? ( )