God on the Rocks

Margaret, a precocious 8-year-old with an adventurous spirit, lives with her odd, fundamentalist Christian parents in a sleepy, seaside English town. A series of events occur around Margaret – including the sudden appearance of her mother’s childhood friends - that bring together a web of people who share a complicated and painful past.

Part comedy, with a bit of tragedy thrown in, the novel examines the toxic effects of longing, stubbornness, and regret, and how people are kept apart and made miserable for the silliest of reasons. It also explores the stock situation of rich-boy-not-allowed-to-marry-his poor-love-due-to-evil-mother without coming across as tired or cliché.

I have absolutely no idea why it’s never occurred to me show more to read a Jane Gardam novel until this week. Good grief. This is warm, witty, quirky, touching, and wonderful. The writing is excellent and the characters are vivid and rich. It’s ridiculously delightful. I love it. show less

First line: Because the baby had come, special attention had to be given to Margaret, who was eight.

Precocious, wise, and innocent, Margaret is allowed to go out on Wednesday afternoons with the maid, Lydia. Her forays into the wider world, away from her severely religious father and acquiescent mother, mark the beginning of the end of her childhood. Over the course of the summer, Margaret sees things she doesn't understand, but which she knows are not right. As she struggles to make sense of this baffling adult world, she impacts those around her in unintended ways.

Like Gardam's novel Crusoe's Daughter, God on the Rocks deals with themes of loss, lonely children, women chaffing at narrow, prescribed lives, the role of religion in show more controlling women, and the sea as both solace and danger. Gardam's writing is honest and unflinching with as little frivolity as the world she depicts. Although rarely happy, her characters feel fully formed and real. Meticulous in her descriptions, each detail adds to the larger image, as a brushstroke in a painting. Nothing is superfluous. I love opening a Gardam book and knowing exactly the sort of reading experience I have ahead of me. show less

Strange but quite compelling read, set in a 1930s seaside town, where eight-year old Margaret, child of Primal Saints parents, is taken out by the unsuitable maid, Lydia. She sees a different world, with Lydia's liaisons with a man; meanwhile her mother imagines the path her life could have taken with an old flame (who has just returned to town), and her father is starting to see Lydia as more than just a soul to be saved...
The writing is extremely funny at times: "It was brawn and shape for tea." but also has a sadness at the way life turns out. Put me somehow in mind of Beryl Bainbridge's writing.

A good absorbing read; nothing earthshaking. The most remarkable and improbable eight year old you will ever meet outside of science fiction, observes and tries to find the logic in her world, which contains some very odd characters. For her mother, caught in a stifling marriage to a fundamentalist bank manager, the past knocks on the door, presents an opportunity, and shows the futility of trying to right what went wrong way back when. A bit too much "I see what you're doing there" with the author's technique. Still, I wanted to see how it all came together, and it did, rather appropriately.

Review written in February, 2011

The qualities that I love about Gardam's books, particularly her earlier ones are those I associate with my favourite early twentieth century writers such as Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Taylor. She can appear to do (deceptively) light and comical whilst also revealing emotion and depth of character.

God on the Rocks had a particularly vintage feel as it is set in the 1930s although it was first published in 1978. Maybe because of her affinity with 1930s writers, the period feel is utterly convincing. The characters eat brawn and shape for high tea ("the brawn was glossy and the shape was matt. Otherwise there was little between them and they were both pale brown"). Only towards the end when things became a little farcical with a married show more woman accidently losing her clothes in the house of a childhood sweetheart, did I think, maybe we are in the 1970s after all!

We are introduced to the story through intelligent, eight year old Margaret who has been brought up a strictly religious father and a mild, accomodating mother. When her mother has a new baby, Lydia the vivacious maid is encouraged to take Margaret for afternoons out. This leads to new characters entering her world such as as painter Drinkwater and Cambridge graduates Binky and Charles. Margaret starts to see the world as something different but can't quite make sense of the new things she hears and the odd relationships between those around her.

As the book develops, the reader learns more about these characters who tend to be delightfully unpredictable yet wholly believable. Events are eventually resolved in a satisfying ending which is almost an epilogue where we find out what ultimately happened to whom! show less

Written in the 1970s but set forty years earlier, this is one of those quiet, revelatory novels of family secrets and childhood understanding whose sensitivity to melancholy seems so well-suited to that period in Britain between the wars.

It's a lovely novel. Though no passages of writing leapt out at me, I'm left with a strong jumble of impressions of English seaside towns, men picking through the surf with trouser-legs rolled up and knotted handkerchiefs on their head, a heavy sense of memory and lost opportunities, a productive opposition between dogmatic religious fervour and a joyous, fleshy sexuality.

Except for the charming and serious eight-year-old, Margaret, most of the people in here are obsessed with choices they made years show more before, looking back variously to spoiled romances, to the first War, to when they still had money, to before dementia set in. This sense of looking back is reinforced by an epilogue set after 1945, and the effect is to make all the characters seem clear but also somehow indistinct, impressionistically blurred by memory. They are not unlike figures in a Renoir painting, one of which – perhaps this one – plays a small, pivotal role in the story. Gardam seems like a wise and generous storyteller and I will definitely read more of her. show less

Not quite as good as "Old Filth," which is the only other book by Gardam I've read to date (although I will surely read the rest). But then again, "Old Filth" is a very hard act to follow and "God on the Rocks", for all it was shortlisted for the Booker back in 1978, was (I think) Gardam's first.

In this novel, Gardam's humor is by turns scathing and sweet and surprising. Her characters are marvels of three-dimensional creation. Here, between the two World Wars, we have quiet, self-contained, old-before-her-years Margaret, growing up in an alarmingly religious household with her mother Ellie, who has just had another child, and her father, Kenneth, Pastor of an evangelical church. Enter stage left -- Lydia, a somewhat blowsy, vulgar and show more undeniably alluring 'maid'. Lydia and Margaret go on day trips, where the world becomes far more complicated than Margaret had imagined up until this point: they visit a lunatic asylum, wherein lives an old lady with many secrets and a painter who paints, among other things, quite a lot of snakes.

Lydia evokes all sorts of emotions, not least of them from pious Kenneth. Ellie, in turn, revives a friendship with a long-lost love, the estranged son of the lady in the asylum. In other words, everyone's life gets a good shaking up, resulting in a rocky cliff of disillusion, which echoes the title -- God on the Rocks.

Gardam uses a complicated omniscient point of view in this work -- multiple voices and multiple time frames, and if she doesn't quite pull it off on every page, she comes close enough for it not to matter. You have to pay attention when you read Gardam, so as not to miss anything, and the effort is well rewarded. Highly recommended. show less