Noel Virtue: Lady Jean

By MARY PAUL*

In advertising his latest novel Noel Virtue's publishers refer to the appalling events that led to Virtue escaping New Zealand at age 20.

Who could blame them? It's a good line, and Lady Jean, Virtue's seventh novel, does contain some of the resonance of those experiences, albeit in a humorous, London context.

I found this quite a gorgeous novel, not exactly a thriller - even though it is recommended by Ruth Rendell - but a baroque, naughty tale of how Lady Jean and her house come alive again after a mysterious and tragic hiatus.

There's something of Angela Carter's excess here, combined with an urbane though compassionate interest in the possible intersections of solitary lives. The novel provokes the thought that healing is brought about by relinquishing control, and letting life just flow around.

Lady Jean, a once fabulously famous blues singer, opens her St John's Wood house dreamily, unwittingly almost, to more and more eccentric residents: relatives, relatives of relatives, rich friends, her best friend (the Devil's Dyke) Frieda, and, most significantly, the young man, Christopher, who cleans the house on Fridays.

Christopher of the big lips and "slight body odour," appears one day crying in the kitchen, banished by his fanatical mother after she finds him "lying fully clothed in the arms of her only brother."

Uncle Fergus (the uncle) becomes a frequent visitor, wearing waistcoats, suits, matching ties in all tones of his favourite colour, yellow - a latter-day Malvolio. His colour tastes are rivalled by the vividness of Aunt Dizzy's blood-red hotpants "left over and still fitting her from the 60s" - which she takes to wearing as London languishes in the early-summer heat.

Next door, the moralistic Mrs Meiklejohn, doing a spot of breakfast-time spying on Jean Barrie's household, is punished as a passing pigeon ejects "several globules of soft white faeces" into her bowl of muesli and milk.

Meanwhile the house shifts and dries in a prolonged heatwave; Christopher believes the house is, figuratively, being reborn.

Jean comes home to the sound of "a gaggle of voices wafting in through the open french windows from the garden." Her guests are ensconced and plotting something.

There are glimpses of other lives in the metropolis: two men of indeterminate age and nationality having sex in the bushes on the southern slopes of Primrose Hill, afterwards casually discussing unusual sites on the internet; another couple, a pair of collared doves disturbed by Mrs Meikeljohn's snooping, rise up into the white heat of the sky and fly off (also) towards Primrose Hill.

Jean is doing okay, her world is now crowded enough to release her fears. She is finally able to recall and recount (and regret) the tragic circumstances that led to the end of her singing career and her curious aloneness, which are gradually unravelled for our edification.

Virtue's writing style is unusually deadpan. He recounts, juxtaposes, but seldom dramatises at any length. This manner could seem to be superficial, as one has to add in one's own associations. As Ruth Rendell suggests in her comment quoted on the cover, the book is a book to be read slowly to be fully appreciated.

Virtue lives back in New Zealand now, in Devonport. Lady Jean has inspired me to read his autobiographical writings - this is a local writer who we will be hearing more about.

Peter Owen

$29.95

* Mary Paul teaches English at Massey University, Albany.