You may never come back the same...

Mary is full of contradictions and one of the most intriguing is the frequent accusation aimed at her that she was a misogynist. This impression is particularly strong if the main reference points are ‘The Charioteer’ and ‘The Last of the Wine’. 

So it was with some surprise that I read the modern novels and found that all of them (well I have one to go) are steeped in male/female sexual politics, uncompromising in their depiction of the struggles of women, and even occasionally allowing the odd woman a moment of victory against the odds.  I would also say that there is plenty of misandry too, even when she is dealing with relatively sympathetic male characters.  The moment when Hilary Mansell realises she does not love her boyfriend after he taunts her with the term ‘feminist’ when she points out that she was hoping for the promotion that was given to him is a good example.

I came to the conclusion that having covered a lot of this ground already, she did not feel the need to single out women for attention in her later novels.  Whether she chose ancient Greece specifically because she wanted to focus on male protagonists I don’t know.  Reading ‘North Face’, I got the impression that she was just thoroughly fed up with the state of Britain and the modern world and desperate for an escape, literal and literary.

But what are we to make of ‘North Face’?  There is plenty to admire, as there is with all her writing, but this, of all her novels, feels gleefully cruel in its depiction of an inexperienced twenty-something woman rushing headlong into marriage with an older man she barely knows. She does a frighteningly good job, not only of taking us through this awful marriage-in-the-making, but, unlike ‘Return to Night’ which seems to level the playing field with its older, professional woman as lead narrator, North Face places a particularly dominant male point of view centre stage, and although there is some great satirical commentary from the minor female characters, the main female love interest has no internal point of view, and her speech is muddled and often inchoate.  The irony is, I find Neil Langton quite a sympathetic character.  He is processing grief as best he can, and he is old-fashioned but thinks he is modern.  I don’t know where she got him from but there is something so recognisable about him.  He has plenty of admirable qualities.  He is not actively malignant.  But he’s not bringing an awful lot to the table and he's damned if he’s going to compromise on the life he wants, and any future wife had better be on board with that.

Perhaps she was getting a little tired of romances where the strong and silent, troubled older man sought solace in a sweet innocent young thing who was meant to be grateful for the attention.  If that was her intention she succeeded.  It is a painful, uncompromising, puncturing of the romantic myth.

One of the most interesting aspects of Mary’s writing is her use of point of view.  It seems to vary constantly, but I think I’m right in saying that 'The Charioteer' is the only novel to use close third person all the way through. It is my favourite mode of narration and gives the novel a cohesion it would not otherwise have.  ‘North Face’ also makes liberal if not exclusive use of it for Neil.  It works very well if you want to conjure up a dry, depressing picture of a man and a country that seems to literally have had the life sucked out of it.  For an anatomy of ordinary, early twentieth century misogyny, it is brutally effective.  But describing misogyny is not the same as practising it.