A Touch of Mistletoe

Another weird and wonderful novel by the weird and wonderful Barbara Comyns. Hilarity, squalor, love and loss.

I think Comyns has one of most genuinely strange ways of seeing of any writer I know. And somehow the very strangeness of her seeing marks her, and her writing, out as incredibly authentic. Even when things are at their worst — when she's an indentured skivvy to a horrible backyard dog-breeder in an Amsterdam suburb, bite-wounds going septic, with no money or means of escape, or when she ("Vicky" in this thinly-fictionalised autobio) and her sister Blanche are starving in London, boiling spuds over a candle and breaking out in boils — the "drunkenness of things being various", to quote MacNeice, shines through. She eschews show more analysis, preferring to let "things", and emotions, speak for themselves. It doesn't matter why she feels a certain way; what's important is the nature of what she feels. It's the same with the world — she writes like a painter, obsessively looking and showing with prose full of brightness, contrast, and something unexpected on every page.

She's like Stevie Smith running a three-legged race with a Mitford.

Everything is off-skew and hobbledehoy. Returning to her flat after a few weeks away she notes that nothing has changed but "the cockroaches had returned, two living and one dead." The title invokes mistletoe's aspect as a clinging, climbing, stifling plant as well as its traditional amatory significance. Vicky marries three times, only once for love, and is never quite able to alter her default state of cloying penury. Men have a tendency to be awful, smothering her with unwanted "sucking kisses" or arbitrarily withholding her inheritance. One is described like this: "he worked at night in a bakery and looked like a piece of mildewed bread and people said he was a gambler." show less