Joanna Cannan (1896–1961)
Author of Murder Included
About the Author
Series
Works by Joanna Cannan
Three Great Pony Stories: The Midnight Horse, Ponies for Hire, and They Bought Her a Pony (1971) — Contributor — 15 copies
Murder Incorporated 1 copy
Associated Works
Frightened Amazon | Mourning After | The Hungry Spider | Poisonous Relations (1950) — Contributor — 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Cannan, Joanna
- Legal name
- Pullein-Thompson, Joanna Maxwell (Cannan)
- Birthdate
- 1896-05-27
- Date of death
- 1961-04-22
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Wychwood School
- Occupations
- children's book author
detective novelist
novelist
pony book author - Organizations
- Voluntary Aid Detachment (WWI)
- Relationships
- Pullein-Thompson, Josephine (daughter)
Pullein-Thompson, Christine (daughter)
Pullein-Thompson, Diana (daughter)
Cannan, Denis (son)
Popescu, Lucy (granddaughter)
Popescu, Charlotte (granddaughter) (show all 8)
Cannan, May Wedderburn (sister)
Cannan, Gilbert (cousin) - Short biography
- Joanna Cannan was born in Oxford, England to a literary family. Her father Charles Cannan, Dean of Trinity College, ran Oxford University Press for many years. Her older sister May Cannan became a poet and her cousin Gilbert Cannan was a novelist-playwright. Joanna was educated at the Wychwood School and attended finishing school in Paris. During World War I, she served as a volunteer nurse, which was how she met her future husband, Captain Harold "Cappy" Pullein-Thompson, whom she married in 1918. The couple had four children, all of whom grew up to be writers. She began writing after her marriage to help support the family, and published a book every year until she died. Her work falls into two main categories: novels for adults such as The Misty Valley (1922) and detective fiction, such as Murder Included (1950); and fiction for children. She established the pony book genre aimed mostly at girls, beginning with A Pony for Jean (1936), which was eventually continued and enlarged by her daughters Josephine Pullein-Thompson, Diana Pullein-Thompson (Farr), and Christine Pullein-Thompson (Keir).
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Wimbledon, England, UK
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England, UK - Place of death
- Blandford Forum, Dorset, England, UK
- Associated Place (for map)
- England, UK
Members
Reviews
Marley Grange in rural Oxfordshire is the home of the Cathcarts. Unlike the older families living nearby, the Cathcarts do not have roots in the area, but rather had "made their money," a fact that sets them apart in the local class scheme. Living at Marley Grange are Mrs. Grace Cathcart and her daughters, Nancy, Sheila and Delia. There was a Mr. Cathcart at one time, but old Humphrey is "at rest now," a situation that Mrs. Cathcart prefers, since there is
"... no stamping in the dressing show more room, no snores, no clearing of a smoker's throat, no arguments about the number of blankets, no sounds, no movement, no will but her own."
The sisters are all homely spinsters, the youngest 38, and Delia, the eldest at 43 is "the most worldly of the Cathcarts, and is referred to as "the man of the family." Sheila is "the highbrow," while Nancy is lovingly known as "our home bird," the sort of woman who would rather stay home and sew. It is a harmonious household, so it seems, and Grace has worked hard to bring up her daughters "to be as courteous and considerate to each other as they were to strangers." The sisters address each other as "darling," and Delia carefully watches over her siblings and runs the household capably, taking care of every problem down to dealing with the servants. She also hunts and breaks in horses.
As the heat ratchets up in the summer, Delia has taken to sleeping outside in a secluded area of the yard next to the house in a small camp bed. One night she goes to her "mannish" bedroom, puts on her "serviceable striped silk pajamas and a woolen dressing gown," and heads on outside for a good night's rest. The next morning, Delia has disappeared. The rest of the family is in a dither, and after Nancy drives around the country lanes to look for her, they decide to call around to see if anyone's seen her. When that proves to be futile, "they rang up the police." Then they make a strange discovery: Delia's suitcase is missing, along with a blue-flowered dress, her hat, and a pair of shoes. The police, represented at first by local Superintendent Dawes, sees a love affair in the disappearance; the rest of the women quickly shut that idea down. After Dawes, described as "common," and an "ordinary policeman" by Nancy, bids them goodbye, Mrs. Cathcart decides they'll just have to find Delia themselves. In calling around to Delia's acquaintances, they discover that another local resident is missing -- a Captain Willoughby of Lane End Farm, a horse-riding friend of Delia's. Could there be a connection? Grace has had enough -- and she pulls some family strings and gets the attention of someone at Scotland Yard. Inspector Guy Northeast, whose career literally hinges on solving this case, is called in to get to the bottom of Delia's disappearance.
While my description of the story in They Rang Up the Police may make this book sound like yet another novel in the English country murder mystery tradition, it is really anything but. Yes, there's a grand house with servants, stables, and a tennis court, and yes, there are a number of clever red herrings built into the story to keep the reader guessing. However, the hedges that keep Marley Grange out of public view off of the main road also hide something else that is more sinister (okay, I know this word is way overused, but it fits) than what's normally found in the standard, garden-variety, traditional-genre tropes. Unfortunately, the gut punch comes at the very end of the book, so I can't really go there.
Aside from the cringeworthy, nails-scraping-a-chalkboard Cathcarts, Cannan has populated her novel with some very bizarre characters one doesn't normally find in a book like this one. My favorite is Gerda Willoughby, a would-be artist, philosopher, self-proclaimed member of the intelligentsia whom the Inspector refers to as "Yet another Ancient Mariner," and "quite tiresome enough to drive a man from home without the incentive of an affair with another woman." In modern parlance, she's a total flake, and her antics are laughworthy but also sad because of how they reflect her sense of alienation among the people in this society. There's a socialist chauffeur, his boss who is a grumpy old curmudgeon, a drunken veterinarian who hides secrets of his own, and the list of suspects goes on. Cannan also has a winner in her Inspector Guy Northeast, a farm boy who did not want to be a farmer, but who instead had dreams of being a Mountie in the RCMP. After leaving home, he finds a supporter in an aunt who encourages him to follow his dream of being a policeman. After some minor successes, he finds himself on the promotion track and achieves the rank of inspector at Scotland Yard. However, he bungles an otherwise open-and-shut case so he's on the receiving end of all of the cases that his superiors at the Yard find too dull to take on themselves, and his career is definitely at risk by the time he takes up the case at Marley Grange. At times in this case he displays a definite nostalgia for farming, mostly because as a farmer no one is around to tell him what to do. He has to deal with the likes of the local policemen who can't fathom that anyone of the upper crust might possibly be involved, that the answer to the strangeness of any of the female characters is due to "sex repression," and that more likely than not, it's going to be a member of one of the working classes who is guilty. Once again, class difference is a major theme that runs throughout the entire book.
Without giving anything away, it is ultimately the psychology behind the crime which, along with the unusual character makeup, makes this book extremely readworthy and sets it apart from the work of Ms. Cannan's more well-known and more popular contemporaries. When all is said and done, all of the zaniness leading up to the ending fades away into a heartbreaking sense of sadness that left me feeling sympathetic rather than antagonistic toward the offender, something that rarely happens, but in this case just feels right. show less
"... no stamping in the dressing show more room, no snores, no clearing of a smoker's throat, no arguments about the number of blankets, no sounds, no movement, no will but her own."
The sisters are all homely spinsters, the youngest 38, and Delia, the eldest at 43 is "the most worldly of the Cathcarts, and is referred to as "the man of the family." Sheila is "the highbrow," while Nancy is lovingly known as "our home bird," the sort of woman who would rather stay home and sew. It is a harmonious household, so it seems, and Grace has worked hard to bring up her daughters "to be as courteous and considerate to each other as they were to strangers." The sisters address each other as "darling," and Delia carefully watches over her siblings and runs the household capably, taking care of every problem down to dealing with the servants. She also hunts and breaks in horses.
As the heat ratchets up in the summer, Delia has taken to sleeping outside in a secluded area of the yard next to the house in a small camp bed. One night she goes to her "mannish" bedroom, puts on her "serviceable striped silk pajamas and a woolen dressing gown," and heads on outside for a good night's rest. The next morning, Delia has disappeared. The rest of the family is in a dither, and after Nancy drives around the country lanes to look for her, they decide to call around to see if anyone's seen her. When that proves to be futile, "they rang up the police." Then they make a strange discovery: Delia's suitcase is missing, along with a blue-flowered dress, her hat, and a pair of shoes. The police, represented at first by local Superintendent Dawes, sees a love affair in the disappearance; the rest of the women quickly shut that idea down. After Dawes, described as "common," and an "ordinary policeman" by Nancy, bids them goodbye, Mrs. Cathcart decides they'll just have to find Delia themselves. In calling around to Delia's acquaintances, they discover that another local resident is missing -- a Captain Willoughby of Lane End Farm, a horse-riding friend of Delia's. Could there be a connection? Grace has had enough -- and she pulls some family strings and gets the attention of someone at Scotland Yard. Inspector Guy Northeast, whose career literally hinges on solving this case, is called in to get to the bottom of Delia's disappearance.
While my description of the story in They Rang Up the Police may make this book sound like yet another novel in the English country murder mystery tradition, it is really anything but. Yes, there's a grand house with servants, stables, and a tennis court, and yes, there are a number of clever red herrings built into the story to keep the reader guessing. However, the hedges that keep Marley Grange out of public view off of the main road also hide something else that is more sinister (okay, I know this word is way overused, but it fits) than what's normally found in the standard, garden-variety, traditional-genre tropes. Unfortunately, the gut punch comes at the very end of the book, so I can't really go there.
Aside from the cringeworthy, nails-scraping-a-chalkboard Cathcarts, Cannan has populated her novel with some very bizarre characters one doesn't normally find in a book like this one. My favorite is Gerda Willoughby, a would-be artist, philosopher, self-proclaimed member of the intelligentsia whom the Inspector refers to as "Yet another Ancient Mariner," and "quite tiresome enough to drive a man from home without the incentive of an affair with another woman." In modern parlance, she's a total flake, and her antics are laughworthy but also sad because of how they reflect her sense of alienation among the people in this society. There's a socialist chauffeur, his boss who is a grumpy old curmudgeon, a drunken veterinarian who hides secrets of his own, and the list of suspects goes on. Cannan also has a winner in her Inspector Guy Northeast, a farm boy who did not want to be a farmer, but who instead had dreams of being a Mountie in the RCMP. After leaving home, he finds a supporter in an aunt who encourages him to follow his dream of being a policeman. After some minor successes, he finds himself on the promotion track and achieves the rank of inspector at Scotland Yard. However, he bungles an otherwise open-and-shut case so he's on the receiving end of all of the cases that his superiors at the Yard find too dull to take on themselves, and his career is definitely at risk by the time he takes up the case at Marley Grange. At times in this case he displays a definite nostalgia for farming, mostly because as a farmer no one is around to tell him what to do. He has to deal with the likes of the local policemen who can't fathom that anyone of the upper crust might possibly be involved, that the answer to the strangeness of any of the female characters is due to "sex repression," and that more likely than not, it's going to be a member of one of the working classes who is guilty. Once again, class difference is a major theme that runs throughout the entire book.
Without giving anything away, it is ultimately the psychology behind the crime which, along with the unusual character makeup, makes this book extremely readworthy and sets it apart from the work of Ms. Cannan's more well-known and more popular contemporaries. When all is said and done, all of the zaniness leading up to the ending fades away into a heartbreaking sense of sadness that left me feeling sympathetic rather than antagonistic toward the offender, something that rarely happens, but in this case just feels right. show less
I'm ever so glad that I bought this book, (as opposed to borrowing it from the library) as I found myself reading and chortling and reading and chortling, and chortling and underlining, and doodling little smiley faces in the margin, and chortling, and underlining, and smiley facing. I can't recall when I've marked up a book so monstrously. This was ripping fun. [Yes, I'm an American who has spent WAY too much time in British fiction and Acorn television, thank you, and this is a Brit story, show more so cheers, matey] A pub filled with a motley assortment of locals. A crafty murder in plain sight. A detective who finds himself falling in love with his most likely suspect. Delightful. A bubbly prosecco and butter cookies kind of read.
Note to anyone who might have a go at it: there are quite a few people involved, I had to make a list and wished that there was a cast of characters up front. More importantly, I was yearning for a pub map as the layout is important. There IS a map on page 63. Wish it had been in the early pages. show less
Note to anyone who might have a go at it: there are quite a few people involved, I had to make a list and wished that there was a cast of characters up front. More importantly, I was yearning for a pub map as the layout is important. There IS a map on page 63. Wish it had been in the early pages. show less
‘You shall have children, whom you shall make princes in the land…
My first #20booksofsummer review (though currently reading my fourth) Princes in the Land is a Persephone book that for some reason I had overlooked through years of perusing the Persephone catalogue. I asked for it recently for my birthday, and I am so glad that I did. Princes in the Land will certainly turn out to be one of my favourite Persephone novels, it is subtle, and in the depictions of the disappointments of show more parenthood I think it quite masterly.
The novel is about family life and motherhood; Patricia Lindsay is a woman who in middle age as her children begin to make lives for themselves is left wondering what her life has been for. Patricia made sacrifices for her children, adapted her expectations of life, but what in the end, was it all for.
princesinthe landWe first meet Patricia as a child in a railway carriage. Patricia is very travel sick, and her mother unaccustomed to such domestic difficulties and with no servant to help is frankly unamused. Patricia and her pretty sister, are travelling to live with their dead father’s family at their Hulver estate in Norfolk. Their mother Blanche is not much liked by her father-in-law – finds herself tolerated, Patricia – to her cold mother’s great surprise is soon her grandfather’s great favourite. Blanche is only a minor character – though superbly drawn, she is determined to make the best of life with her husband’s family. Blanche is unhappy at the need to rely on her husband’s Almeric’s father who she thinks of as bad old Lord Waveney. Blanche favours her older, prettier daughter Angela – who in time will marry a title.
“He could have forgiven her her worm’s eye view, her social ruthlessness, her sickening smug materialism, but her euphemisms, her not mentioning, made him squirm; he was exasperated beyond measure by the false humility with which she took his money. She wasn’t an honest snob: she couldn’t say ‘labourer’ or ‘gentleman’: she said ‘people of our class’ and ‘nobody’. And she wasn’t an honest gold-digger: she couldn’t say thank you and keep her soul: she gave in to him in all things. Agreed with him, pandered to him, shutting her thin lips on the most trivial difference of opinion in the way that says. ‘I can’t answer back; I’m a poor relation.’ It is doubtful if, in spite of his good resolutions, he would have kept her at Hulver but for the sudden, and to Blanche’s mind inexplicable, fancy which he took for Patricia.”
At Hulver Patricia grows up used to great privilege, allowed to indulge her passion for horses, hunting and the countryside, she is never expected to learn sewing or cooking. Patricia has a wonderful relationship with her grandfather, he is her indulgent friend and confident, who she will carry with her through life. However, his estate passes to a male heir on his death. With Angela already satisfactorily married – Patricia meets Hugh Lindsay, an impoverished Scottish academic, who much to Blanche’s horror Patricia becomes engaged to.
Marriage to Hugh brings great change to Patricia’s life – she must learn to cook and keep her small house neat and clean on a budget, gone is her beloved horsey outdoor life. Patricia, adapts, she learns how to be a good wife – and she represses the pangs she sometimes feels for the life she lived at Hulver when her grandfather was alive. Hugh seems to forget the time he was entranced by the sight of his flame haired love riding a spirited former Grand National winner in the grounds of Hulver.
“It didn’t occur to him to wonder whether she was dead or sleeping, the red headed hoyden who had taken him riding in the Hulver oak woods; it didn’t occur to him to ask whether it was at all painful, this adapting process, whether the young self whimpered as you smothered it deeper and deeper until it slept or died.”
Three children are born to Patricia and Hugh, two sons and a daughter. Patricia gives her whole life to her children.
When Hugh is given a professorship at an Oxford college, Patricia manages to persuade him to buy a house on the outskirts of Oxford. A ramshackle old farmhouse with some land, room for a horse, space for her children to roam about in, the smells and sounds of the rural life that Patricia loved so much as a girl.
Patricia has her hopes for her children – she thinks she understands them; thinks she know which way their lives will take them. However, England between the wars is a place of great change, the social inequalities don’t matter so much to the young, and new experiences are opening up. Patricia’s children all choose paths which surprise her. She is puzzled, and distressed, she has given her whole life to these three young people, and in the end they move in directions she can barely understand.
“…first August, then Giles, then Nicola had gone, further than any ship or train or aeroplane could have taken them, far over ranges you couldn’t climb, seas you couldn’t sail, across the intangible deserts of experiences she’d no part in, to lives and loves and hopes in which she had no share.”
This is a wonderful novel, I can’t think why I managed to overlook it so long. An exquisite examination of family life that shows with brilliant honesty and some poignancy that parents can’t live their children’s lives for them, and however much it may distress them they must allow them to go their own way in the end. Patricia comes to the point in her life only in her forties, when her life’s work is done – and in accepting this new world she must adapt herself again. show less
My first #20booksofsummer review (though currently reading my fourth) Princes in the Land is a Persephone book that for some reason I had overlooked through years of perusing the Persephone catalogue. I asked for it recently for my birthday, and I am so glad that I did. Princes in the Land will certainly turn out to be one of my favourite Persephone novels, it is subtle, and in the depictions of the disappointments of show more parenthood I think it quite masterly.
The novel is about family life and motherhood; Patricia Lindsay is a woman who in middle age as her children begin to make lives for themselves is left wondering what her life has been for. Patricia made sacrifices for her children, adapted her expectations of life, but what in the end, was it all for.
princesinthe landWe first meet Patricia as a child in a railway carriage. Patricia is very travel sick, and her mother unaccustomed to such domestic difficulties and with no servant to help is frankly unamused. Patricia and her pretty sister, are travelling to live with their dead father’s family at their Hulver estate in Norfolk. Their mother Blanche is not much liked by her father-in-law – finds herself tolerated, Patricia – to her cold mother’s great surprise is soon her grandfather’s great favourite. Blanche is only a minor character – though superbly drawn, she is determined to make the best of life with her husband’s family. Blanche is unhappy at the need to rely on her husband’s Almeric’s father who she thinks of as bad old Lord Waveney. Blanche favours her older, prettier daughter Angela – who in time will marry a title.
“He could have forgiven her her worm’s eye view, her social ruthlessness, her sickening smug materialism, but her euphemisms, her not mentioning, made him squirm; he was exasperated beyond measure by the false humility with which she took his money. She wasn’t an honest snob: she couldn’t say ‘labourer’ or ‘gentleman’: she said ‘people of our class’ and ‘nobody’. And she wasn’t an honest gold-digger: she couldn’t say thank you and keep her soul: she gave in to him in all things. Agreed with him, pandered to him, shutting her thin lips on the most trivial difference of opinion in the way that says. ‘I can’t answer back; I’m a poor relation.’ It is doubtful if, in spite of his good resolutions, he would have kept her at Hulver but for the sudden, and to Blanche’s mind inexplicable, fancy which he took for Patricia.”
At Hulver Patricia grows up used to great privilege, allowed to indulge her passion for horses, hunting and the countryside, she is never expected to learn sewing or cooking. Patricia has a wonderful relationship with her grandfather, he is her indulgent friend and confident, who she will carry with her through life. However, his estate passes to a male heir on his death. With Angela already satisfactorily married – Patricia meets Hugh Lindsay, an impoverished Scottish academic, who much to Blanche’s horror Patricia becomes engaged to.
Marriage to Hugh brings great change to Patricia’s life – she must learn to cook and keep her small house neat and clean on a budget, gone is her beloved horsey outdoor life. Patricia, adapts, she learns how to be a good wife – and she represses the pangs she sometimes feels for the life she lived at Hulver when her grandfather was alive. Hugh seems to forget the time he was entranced by the sight of his flame haired love riding a spirited former Grand National winner in the grounds of Hulver.
“It didn’t occur to him to wonder whether she was dead or sleeping, the red headed hoyden who had taken him riding in the Hulver oak woods; it didn’t occur to him to ask whether it was at all painful, this adapting process, whether the young self whimpered as you smothered it deeper and deeper until it slept or died.”
Three children are born to Patricia and Hugh, two sons and a daughter. Patricia gives her whole life to her children.
When Hugh is given a professorship at an Oxford college, Patricia manages to persuade him to buy a house on the outskirts of Oxford. A ramshackle old farmhouse with some land, room for a horse, space for her children to roam about in, the smells and sounds of the rural life that Patricia loved so much as a girl.
Patricia has her hopes for her children – she thinks she understands them; thinks she know which way their lives will take them. However, England between the wars is a place of great change, the social inequalities don’t matter so much to the young, and new experiences are opening up. Patricia’s children all choose paths which surprise her. She is puzzled, and distressed, she has given her whole life to these three young people, and in the end they move in directions she can barely understand.
“…first August, then Giles, then Nicola had gone, further than any ship or train or aeroplane could have taken them, far over ranges you couldn’t climb, seas you couldn’t sail, across the intangible deserts of experiences she’d no part in, to lives and loves and hopes in which she had no share.”
This is a wonderful novel, I can’t think why I managed to overlook it so long. An exquisite examination of family life that shows with brilliant honesty and some poignancy that parents can’t live their children’s lives for them, and however much it may distress them they must allow them to go their own way in the end. Patricia comes to the point in her life only in her forties, when her life’s work is done – and in accepting this new world she must adapt herself again. show less
Opening in the 1860s, Joanna Cannan's High Table is the story of Theodore Fletcher, who from a shy, awkward, introspective child grows into a shy, awkward, introspective young man. Physically rather weak, terrible at games, and socially inept, Theodore consoles himself for his inadequacies by clinging to the idea of the superiority of the intellectual life, untainted by the "animal" in man. His theories receive a rude shock when his "purely intellectual" relationship with the local show more publican's daughter, in which he lends her books and lectures her on his theories, ends in a single sex act and an unwanted pregnancy.
Fleeing his responsibilities, Theodore escapes to Oxford University, and there he stays. Excelling academically, he wins a Fellowship, and in time achieves the great ambition of his life when he is elected Warden of St Mary's College. For a brief time, Theodore blossoms...only to shrink back even further into his sterile and lonely life when he discovers that far from indicating his colleagues' respect for him, his election was arranged just to keep another man out of the position. Theodore passes many empty years until the outbreak of World War I, when an accidental encounter with a young soldier who he believes to be the result of that single sexual encounter in his youth changes everything...
Joanna Cannan's father was Dean of Trinity College, and one wonders (although the two of them seem to have gotten along) if this novel was intended as some sort of "revenge" upon him or upon his institution. It's very well-written, but often a quite difficult read. We may understand and even sympathise with Theodore, at least to an extent (particularly the more awkward and socially inept of us!), but he's not a likeable person, and his company does become a little wearisome.
But of course, the point of the novel is Theodore's eventual "awakening" upon becoming acquainted with Lennard Twigg and his fiancée, Doreen Logan, two happily normal and completely unintellectual young people who exemplify everything that is positive about the "animal" life that Theodore has scorned and rejected. Although keeping the secret of Lennard's birth, Theodore befriends the young couple and begins to understand what he has, not just missed, but deliberately thrown away in life. This new perspective offers Theodore the chance of something like redemption and a purpose in life, particularly when Lennard is recalled to France and persuades Doreen to marry him before he goes.
The revolution in Theodore's attitude and his growing scorn for his own narrow existence is entirely understandable. However, the difficulty for the reader of High Table is deciding whether Theodore's eventual dismissal of academia, of education and intellectual pursuits generally, as ultimately useless and without purpose, a way of avoiding life rather than adding to it, is to be taken at face value. We are given no perspective but Theodore's, no alternative viewpoint; supporting characters like Haughton, from whom Theodore takes the Wardenship, with his "Rabelaisian" humour and his six lively daughters, are given little chance to air their views. While I imagine some readers might find themselves quite in agreement with Theodore's conclusions, I have to say that for me, the apparent creeping anti-intellectualism of the novel made it something of a discomforting read:
"All these years of war, I was just what I couldn't bear to be, what Hamilton and Quears and the rest of them thought me---a man who'd nothing to worry over because he had sat himself down at High Table and let common life go by, a pretender to the knowledge that has not spared the human race its Great War, living in a place that was a shell. If it should be true that one is born again, he thought, let me be born a farm-hand, to turn the clods and drive the beasts and giggle obscenely at the corner of the green on Sunday afternoons, but, at least, while I'm alive to live the life of earth..." show less
Fleeing his responsibilities, Theodore escapes to Oxford University, and there he stays. Excelling academically, he wins a Fellowship, and in time achieves the great ambition of his life when he is elected Warden of St Mary's College. For a brief time, Theodore blossoms...only to shrink back even further into his sterile and lonely life when he discovers that far from indicating his colleagues' respect for him, his election was arranged just to keep another man out of the position. Theodore passes many empty years until the outbreak of World War I, when an accidental encounter with a young soldier who he believes to be the result of that single sexual encounter in his youth changes everything...
Joanna Cannan's father was Dean of Trinity College, and one wonders (although the two of them seem to have gotten along) if this novel was intended as some sort of "revenge" upon him or upon his institution. It's very well-written, but often a quite difficult read. We may understand and even sympathise with Theodore, at least to an extent (particularly the more awkward and socially inept of us!), but he's not a likeable person, and his company does become a little wearisome.
But of course, the point of the novel is Theodore's eventual "awakening" upon becoming acquainted with Lennard Twigg and his fiancée, Doreen Logan, two happily normal and completely unintellectual young people who exemplify everything that is positive about the "animal" life that Theodore has scorned and rejected. Although keeping the secret of Lennard's birth, Theodore befriends the young couple and begins to understand what he has, not just missed, but deliberately thrown away in life. This new perspective offers Theodore the chance of something like redemption and a purpose in life, particularly when Lennard is recalled to France and persuades Doreen to marry him before he goes.
The revolution in Theodore's attitude and his growing scorn for his own narrow existence is entirely understandable. However, the difficulty for the reader of High Table is deciding whether Theodore's eventual dismissal of academia, of education and intellectual pursuits generally, as ultimately useless and without purpose, a way of avoiding life rather than adding to it, is to be taken at face value. We are given no perspective but Theodore's, no alternative viewpoint; supporting characters like Haughton, from whom Theodore takes the Wardenship, with his "Rabelaisian" humour and his six lively daughters, are given little chance to air their views. While I imagine some readers might find themselves quite in agreement with Theodore's conclusions, I have to say that for me, the apparent creeping anti-intellectualism of the novel made it something of a discomforting read:
"All these years of war, I was just what I couldn't bear to be, what Hamilton and Quears and the rest of them thought me---a man who'd nothing to worry over because he had sat himself down at High Table and let common life go by, a pretender to the knowledge that has not spared the human race its Great War, living in a place that was a shell. If it should be true that one is born again, he thought, let me be born a farm-hand, to turn the clods and drive the beasts and giggle obscenely at the corner of the green on Sunday afternoons, but, at least, while I'm alive to live the life of earth..." show less
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