The Flint Anchor

I don’t think I did Sylvia Townsend Warner justice by reading ‘The Flint Anchor’ while struggling to focus because of intense neck and shoulder pain. All her books have quite different genres, settings, and structures, yet she retains has the same distinctively witty voice. Here, the simple tale of a comfortable middle class Victorian family becomes surprisingly dark and subtle in her hands. I don’t have as much to say about it as I would had I been feeling less wretched while reading. Nonetheless, the superficially content yet deeply dysfunctional family dynamics are drawn with great skill. The dialogue is wonderfully acidic and the material details convincing. The tragedies recounted are too minor to attain sublimity, so show more remain firmly in the realm of farce. For all that, these family tribulations are moving and the characters sympathetic. The constraints placed upon women are made very clear, as are their various forms of escape: religion, good works, alcoholism, etc. The patriarch John Barnard seems in control of the family, yet gradually reveals himself to be flawed, confused, and blinkered. No simple message is conveyed by the story, which has a similar rhythm to [b:The Corner That Held Them|958668|The Corner That Held Them|Sylvia Townsend Warner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348920339l/958668._SY75_.jpg|943578]. Although I prefer Townsend Warner’s more melodramatic and supernatural fiction, especially [b:Summer Will Show|958670|Summer Will Show|Sylvia Townsend Warner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1228918840l/958670._SY75_.jpg|943580], everything I’ve read of hers has proved compelling and entertainingly subversive. show less

Exquisite read telling the life of John Barnard, a stern and righteous Norfolk businessman in the early Victorian years. Stuck in an unloving marriage with a wife becoming increasingly dependent on madeira; bereft after losing five children in infancy; disappointed in his eldest son who was sent down from Cambridge then emigrated; and in his daughters, spinsterish Euphemia, and Ellen, disfigured by a birthmark - he gives all his love to remaining daughter Mary. But he is unable to recognise her intrinsic selfishness and coldness...