122/2020. This indescribable novel is difficult to review meaningfully, but as there aren't any previous reviews....

The novel is intensely whimsical. The book appears almost to be an entity narrating itself. It believes imaginative creativity can save the world, or at least save each of us inside our own internal worlds, or maybe it doesn't. It believes in ghosts and loving kindness and other physically impossible things, or maybe it doesn't. It was written in 1916 when the British military was engaged in a land and sea war with devastating loss of life, and London was under lethal air attack by the German military, and the most tragic passage is a deaf woman awaiting her son's return from the army, but the most aggressive passage is devoted not to warmongering but to defending Jewish immigrant women being exploited to death in factories without adequate health and safety. The plot, a fanciful quest, is mostly irrelevant to a reader's potential enjoyment, and the last section is wilfully titled "ANTI-CLIMAX". The writing style ranges freely from absolutely brilliant to utterly dreadful, and the structure has no chapters as such but is punctuated by occasional outbreaks of poetry, i.e. there are rhymes but no reason as the opening paragraph makes clear:

'This is the end, for the moment, of all my thinking, this is my unfinal conclusion. There is no reason in tangible things, and no system in the ordinary ways of the world. Hands were made to grope, and feet to stumble, and the only things you may count on are the unaccountable things. System is a fairy and a dream, you never find system where or when you expect it. There are no reasons except reasons you and I don't know.'

Quotes

Framed: 'She wore spectacles with aggressive tortoise-shell rims. She said, "I am short-sighted. I am obliged to wear spectacles. Why should I try to conceal the fact? I will not have a pair of rimless ghosts haunting my face. I will wear spectacles without shame." But the real truth was that the tortoise-shell rims were more becoming to her.'

Intergenerational warfare written in 1916 (reminiscent of Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay): 'Oh, Kew, what are the old that they should check us? What's the use of this war of one generation against another? Old people and young people reach a deadlock that's as bad as marriage without the possibility of divorce. Isn't all forced fidelity wrong?'

Moar intergenerational woar: 'Cousin Gustus distrusted youth. He thought young people were always either lying to him or laughing at him, and indeed they often were. Only not so often as he thought.'

Pillow factory and anti-hair product-ism: '[...] why is it that when you're already frightened is the moment that men choose to frighten you? Because weakness is the worst crime. That I have proved. My work was putting fluff into bolsters. There was a big bright grocers' calendar — the Death of Nelson — and if I could see it through the fog of fluff I felt that was a lucky day. I had to eat my lunch there, raspberry jam sandwiches — not fruit jam, you know, but raspberry flavour. It wasn't nice, and it used to get fluffy in that air. The others sat round and munched and picked their teeth and read Jew newspapers. Have you ever noticed that whichever way up you look at a Jew newspaper, you always feel as if you could read it better if you were standing on your head? My governor was a Jew too. He wasn't bad, but he looked wet, and his hair was a horror to me. His voice was tired of dealing with fluff—though he didn't deal with it so intimately as we did — and it only allowed him to whisper. The forewoman was always cross, but always as if she would rather not be so, as if she were being cross for a bet, and as if some one were watching her to see she was not kind by mistake. She looked terribly ill, because she had worked there for three months, which was a record. I stood it five weeks, and then I had a haemorrhage — only from the throat, the doctor said. I wanted to go to bed, but you can't, because the panel doctors in these parts will not come to you. My doctor was half an enormous mile away, and it seemed he only existed between seven and nine in the evenings. So I stayed up, so as not to get too weak to walk. I went and asked the governor for my stamps. I had only five stamps due to me, only five valuable threepences had been stopped out of my wages. But I had a silly conviction at that time that the Insurance Act was invented to help working people. What an absurd idea of mine! I went to the Jew for my card. He said mine was a hard case, but I was not entitled to a card; nobody under thirty, he said, was allowed by law to have a card. So I said it was only fair to tell him I was going to the Factory and Insurance Inspectors about him. I told him lots of things, and I was so angry that I cried. He was very angry too, and made me feel sick by splashing his wet hair about. He said it was unfair for ladies to interfere in things they knew nothing about. I said I interfered because I knew nothing about it, but that now I knew. I said that ladies and women had exactly the same kind of inside, and it was a kind that never thrived on fluff instead of food. I told him how I spent my ten shillings. He couldn't interrupt really, because he had no voice. Then I fainted, and a friend I have there, called Mrs. Love, came in. She had been listening at the door. She was very good to me. Then, when I was well again, I found another job, but I shan't tell you what it is. As for the Inspectors, I complained, but — what's the use? So long as you must put fluff of that pernicious kind into bolsters, just so long will you kill the strength and the beauty of women.'

Shiver: 'Fragments of untold stories are familiar to her. She knows how you may hear in the dark a movement by your bed, and fling out your hand and feel it grasped, and then feel the grasp slide up from your hand to your shoulder, from your shoulder to your throat, from your throat to your heart. She knows how you may go between trees in the moonlight to meet your friend, and find suddenly that some one is keeping pace with you, and how you, mistaking this companion for your friend, may say some silly greeting that only your friend understands. And how your heart drops as you hear the first breath of the reply. She knows how, walking in the mid-day streets of London, you may cross the path of some Great One who had a prior right by many thousand years to walk beside the Thames. These are the ghost stories that never get told. Few people can read them between the lines of press accounts of inquests, or in the dignified announcements of the failure of hearts, on the front page of the Morning Post.'

Tides: 'The knocking of the slow sea upon the cliff seemed like the ticking of the great clock that is our world.'

A deaf mother on her son in the army coming home on leave (extract doesn't capture the whole passage, which I found moving): ' "I dare say you would think Murray a rotter if you met him. It doesn't matter much. It doesn't matter at all. Nothing matters, because he will come home to-night."
Kew fidgeted a moment, and then took the slate and wrote: "I am very much afraid that all leave from abroad has been stopped this week."
"Yes, I know," said the mother, "I have been unhappy about that for some days. But it doesn't make any difference to Murray now. You see, I heard last night that he was killed on Tuesday. That's why I know he will come, and I shall be waiting here." '

Tripe: 'His train was one which boasted a restaurant car, and Kew patronised this institution. But when he was in the middle of cold meat, he thought: "She is probably trying to live on twopence-halfpenny a week. Continual tripe and onions."
So he refused pudding. The pudding, persistent as only a railway pudding can be, came back incredulously three times. But Kew pushed it away.'

A 1916 London omnibus conductress's uniform skirt fell just below the knee but she stood up on a platform and the skirts were flared A-lines: 'The gaiters of the 'bus-conductor had shaken Kew to his foundations. The thought of the skirt still brought his heart into his mouth.' (Englishwomen, and more men, also began wearing pyjamas instead of nightdresses/nightshirts in case they were bombed at night.)

On imagined US pacifism, but not: '[...] patriotism will come in time to be considered a vice. How can one's soul — if you take my meaning — be effected by the latitude and longitude in which one's body was born? From the States the truth shall come, salvation shall dawn in the west.' ( )