Beryl Bainbridge: According to Queeney

By ELSPETH SANDYS

Briliiant though Beryl Bainbridge undoubtedly is (she has been twice short-listed for the Booker Prize), with her great language skill and the unpredictability of her narratives, I have not so far been moved by her stories. I had hoped that According to Queeney, would change the pattern. It has not done so, though my admiration for her skill is greater than ever.

Occupying centre stage in this 18th-century tale is Dr Samuel Johnson, a man who towered over his contemporaries for his wit, learning and compassion. Johnson's story has been told, famously, by his disciple, James Boswell, but Bainbridge has uncovered a narrative, apparently unknown to Boswell, that reveals the good doctor in the latter part of his life as a man tormented by the need for home and family, and in thrall to a woman known more for her audacity than her good character.

Hester Thrale, whose portrait with her eldest daughter Queeney by Sir Joshua Reynolds adorns the cover of this book, was married to Henry Thrale, a successful brewer and MP for Southwark. In his late middle-age, Johnson, lured by Thrale's hospitality and reverence for men of letters, takes up semi-permanent residence in the brewer's household. His affection for his benefactor is genuine, but it is his benefactor's wife who is the true magnet, drawing the great lexicographer and poet away from the clubs and dinner tables of London to the Thrales' riverside home at Streatham Park.

Contemporary reports describe Hester as alluring rather than beautiful, but there is no doubting her attraction for Johnson, whose presence at her dinner parties and home greatly added to her social appeal.

Bainbridge's descriptions of these social and familial occasions are so vivid the reader can practically smell the odours from the kitchen, the gardens and the river, not to mention the freely used chamber pots, and the reek of bad breath and infrequently washed bodies.

Yet for all its vivacity, According to Queeney doesn't really develop, but moves along anecdotally, lessening the tension of what is otherwise a story packed with delights. Wonderful characters - Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Fanny Burney, David Garrick, James Boswell - stalk the pages, rubbing shoulders with the colourful members of Johnson's chaotic London household. Who could forget the lecherous but loyal Mrs Desmoulins, or the permanently sozzled Mr Levet? Johnson's concern for the people who are dependent on him is part of the charm of the man, as it is of the story.

The sense of bustling life, of characters high and low living in close proximity, of death and desire, disease and excess of living overlapping and spilling into one another is marvellously realised. There is not a word or a phrase that doesn't ring true, so that the reader is left with the impression of a time when thinking was valued (thinking and feeling being seen as allied, not contradictory), conversation regarded as an art, and words treasured for the doors they unlocked and the mysteries they revealed.

Little wonder Bainbridge's literary contemporaries deplore that she has not - so far - been awarded the Booker Prize.

Abacus

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* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland writer.