Kathy PageCritiques

Kathy Page has written a year-spanning and incredibly readable novel in Dear Evelyn. The story begins pre-WW2, and we follow Evelyn and Harry through wartime and afterwards, through hard times and good, until old age. Not that Evelyn ever finds anything good.

I found the beginning years more carefully drawn- once they have their children, time skips right along. A parent to three myself, I understand that this does really happen (I have absolutely no memory of the late 80’s, early 90’s for example), but I found myself yearning for a few more details between decades.

Harry loves Evelyn much more than she loves him- her feelings are rarely mentioned, unless they are annoyance, and their relationship seems to be one of her complaining and him meeting any of her desires. I felt for him. I wanted to feel for her, but her waspishness reminded me of the bitterness I developed during my marriage...something that I rejected and fled.

The war scenes are especially gripping and carry the weight of this novel. The author says she used some of of her father’s letters to her mother when he was deployed as research- perhaps this is why this section reads the truest.

I found Evelyn a bit tiresome (as was Harry) - but I felt sorrier for Harry, especially as he is placed in a home.

Worth a read. I gulped it back in one evening. It held my attention throughout. Clever scene and time cutting made the story run along.

Interesting stories about "twos": couples, siblings, teacher and student, hairdresser and client, etc.

Blurb says they "reflect our yearning for meaningful connection". They were okay.½

Just not the book for me at this time.

Het kan: een liefdes- en huwelijksroman zonder sentimentele kitsch die begint bij de geboorte en eindigt met de dood. Een verhaal van twee doodgewone mensen, Harry en Evelyn, dat laat zien hoe hun gevoelens voor elkaar met de tijdgeest mee veranderen. En hoe sluipend of radicaal hun machtsverhoudingen ondermijnd worden wanneer de levenscirkel bijna rond is.
Ze leren elkaar op een middag in een Londense bibliotheek kennen. Harry, een sensitieve natuur- en literatuurliefhebber, is gefascineerd door de wilskrachtige Evelyn en hij zal dat ook altijd blijven. Maar de ander gelukkig maken blijkt iets wat hen een leven lang veel moeite kost.
Ze doen beiden hun uiterste best. Evelyn probeert van hun eigenwijze dochters fatsoenlijke vrouwen te maken en haar ‘appetijt voor de betere dingen’ voor Harry te verbergen. Harry doet er alles aan om zijn middenstandersdroom van een groot en licht huis met een keuken met een stalen afwasbak waar te maken.
Page is een meester van de tussentonen en laat ons zien hoe Harry in zijn streven naar een fatsoenlijk leven en Evelyn in haar onverzadigbaar perfectionisme langzaam uitgeput raken. Er sluipt een melancholie in het huwelijk, die het enthousiasme voor lange wandelingen en de liefde voor gedichten opvreet, opslokt, vernielt. Waren de wederzijdse teleurstellingen op hun oude dag te vermijden geweest? Wat heeft het evenwicht in hun machts- en liefdesverhoudingen verstoord, en waar hebben ze de verkeerde afslag genomen?
Een huwelijk van zeventig jaar dat leest als een thriller, verteld op het hoogste literaire Gardam-niveau. Voor gehuwden en ongehuwden: dringend lezen! (bron Standaard Boekhandel)

Een gouden raad: word géén Evelyn!!½

I have a real affinity for Canadian authors but Kathy Page is a new one for me. After reading her beautifully written novel about the love and marriage of Harry and Evelyn Miles I will be seeking out more of her work.

The title would lead you to believe that this is an epistolary novel but that's not really true. It does have some excerpts of letters, mostly Harry's letters to Evelyn from Egypt during WWII, letters that are actually, word for word, letters written by the author's father; but for the most part the novel is a regularly framed narrative that covers their 70 years of marriage.

Although Page definitely brings out the joy and struggle of raising a family in the middle of the 20th century, I found the sections describing the changes that a marriage goes through, even after dealing with difficulties in raising children, to be the most heartbreaking, and yet probably very common.

Towards the end of the book, Harry and Evelyn are quite elderly and facing the extreme challenges of aging. Evelyn is distraught:

"What no one seemed to understand was that he was not the man she had married. Not the man who had written those letters in the war, or come back from it and built the house....The fact was that things ended. She felt suddenly very weak, sat down on the bed, put her head in her hands and sobbed until there was not a sound left in her."

Harry's got a quite different take:

"Evelyn, Evelyn! He had loved her all his adult life, long after the gloss of their youth and it's illusions had been worn away and left them with the essentials of who they were, along with a collection of sometimes contradictory memories...He had never denied her anything, material or emotional, that he could provide, and what she desired now was his absence from her daily life. Evelyn! She was frightened by weakness. It did help considerably to understand her from the inside. To align himself in that way with her."

Beautifully written, heartbreaking but at the same time so realistic, I was completely absorbed by Harry and Evelyn's story. Very highly recommended.½

It is the eve of WWII and Harry Miles rushes to the library entering at the reference library doors just as Evelyn Hill exits, several books in her arms. A copy of Du Maurier’s “Rebecca” escapes her grasp and falls. Harry picks it up. “Is it any good?” he asks. “I’ll find out when I read it, she tells him.” And so begins a relationship, and the story of a marriage that lasts for decades until death separates the two. And from the dust jacket: It “explores how two very different people come together to shape and reshape each other over a lifetime.”

While not a completely epistolary novel as the title might suggest, the book does include many letters during the war years, some of which the author has taken in part, or whole, from her own father’s letters. A captivating story from beginning to end, this is a beautifully-written story; intimate, compassionate and remarkably honest.½

The British-Canadian author, Kathy Page, is new to me, so I did not know what to expect in DEAR EVELYN. Initially I was intrigued by the young protagonist Harry Miles' interest in poetry, and how it was stimulated by the efforts of a teacher who was a disfigured, damaged veteran of the Great War. The poetry of Edward Thomas plays a central role throughout the novel, which also interested me, because, although I'm not really familiar with Thomas's work, I had recently read a fascinating essay on Thomas and his place in the pantheon of war poets in Samuel Hynes' thoughtful collection, ON WAR AND WRITING. Page sprinkles pertinent lines of Thomas's poems throughout her narrative and makes it plain that Harry, a veteran of the North Africa campaign in the Second World War, a lover of nature, and a man who yearns for a more rewarding, literary life, is a great admirer of Thomas, and has studied the obscure poet's work and life in great detail.

So there's that - the literary element - which drew me in. And then there was Evelyn, the title character, a fiery, determined, ambitious woman who evolves in ways that make her, variously, both admirable and unlikable. Harry's love for her, however, remains constant and unshakable. And yet, and yet ...

DEAR EVELYN gets its title from the many letters Harry writes to her from the war. Page tells us, in her Acknowledgements, that these letters - indeed, the book itself - were inspired by her own father's letters to her mother during WWII. How "dear" Evelyn actually is will probably be a debatable point for many readers, due to her increasingly nit-picking, inflexible ways and total inability to curb her sharp tongue or to apologize - ever! And although Harry never really stops loving Evelyn, he also realized that "there was a line between strong-minded and outrageous that Evelyn now crossed with increasing frequency."

Because at the heart of this absolutely beautiful novel is a marriage that endures for over seventy years, giving you a front-row seat at how everyday life (Harry is a kind of corporate "bean counter," financially successful if unhappy in his work) , family pressures (there are three daughters, the last one a change-of-life 'surprise'), and the physical indignities of aging can change people and reverse roles in a relationship.

There is a particular passage which might explain the almost morbid fascination some readers will feel in reading this book. In it Harry is reading yet another biography of the poet Edward Thomas and finds that he identifies more closely with the poet's wife, Helen, "because she was forever fitting herself around someone driven and intransigent. And it was oddly gripping ... though also strange, to learn about the intricacies of another couple's married life." Gripping indeed, perhaps even voyeuristic.

But here's the thing. Harry and Evelyn became so real to me as I followed their long life's journey together that I wanted so badly for things to to turn out right for them, as a couple. I wanted that "happily ever after" thing for them, wanted them to be okay. Maybe it's because my wife and I are now fifty -plus years into our life together. Many of the things that Harry and Evelyn experience and manage to get through - well, us too.

I literally had trouble putting this book down. This couple - young, then middle-aged, and, finally, old - were so real, so utterly human, so important. I was weeping as I read the final pages. Big tears - my wife was asking me what was wrong? I loved this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Bravo, Ms Page. Bravo!

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

This novel, a study of a 70-year marriage, is about ordinary people but is extraordinary in quality.

Harry Miles, a sensitive man with a love of poetry, meets Evelyn Hill and falls in love immediately. He describes her personality when he first meets her: “She had an appetite for the better things, quick judgement, a very strong will, a dislike of doubt or ambiguity, and a way of making her words count. Her opinions and feelings stormed through her. She warmed to appreciation.” The two marry during the early years of World War II, and because Harry enlists and is sent to North Africa, their first years are “islands of cohabitation in an ocean of separation.” After the war, they begin what Harry calls “a new marriage: real now, an everyday, actual thing instead of a frenzied week trying to make up for lost time and then a slew of letters.”

After the war, Harry has clear hopes for his life. He does not want to be a “slug of a man, pale and oblivious, bored, existing, yes, but not much more than that”; instead, “Having survived the war, I hope not to be ground down by the peace. I want to stay alert. To love passionately. To go beyond myself. Even, still, to write.” However, Harry loves Evelyn and wants to give her everything she wants: “He is her agent. She articulates an aim, he finds the way.” He takes a job in municipal construction and works hard so they eventually have a beautiful home with room for a large garden. They raise three children who have opportunities denied their parents. They should be happy but that is not the case, especially as they age and contend with physical infirmities.

Harry observes that “Marriages were not equal or fair” and it is obvious from the beginning that his marriage to Evelyn will not be either. Harry loves Evelyn beyond measure and when not with her tries to write about his feelings: “But despite or because of the intensity of his feelings, it was impossible. He could barely read. It was as if he had lost all access to language.” Evelyn, on the other hand, misses “his attention to her comfort and well-being, the feeling of her own value, a deep acknowledgement of that. On her part, there was no suffering, no feverishness, no lovesickness.” Harry wants his wife to be happy and early on decides that he will devote himself to giving her what she wants. When they move into a new home with a garden he tells her, “’We’d only known each other about half an hour . . . but I knew then that you must have your own house with a garden. . . . I knew I must get it for you.’” Her response is, “’I just wish the garden would grow faster.’”

There is an overwhelming feeling of sadness because of how Harry’s love is not returned in kind and his sacrifices are unappreciated. He takes a job he does not enjoy because it provides financial security and enables him to give Evelyn what she wants and his children what they need. Unfortunately, he loses himself in the process: “He would never complete a poem to his satisfaction, much less send one to a little magazine, however much he had once imagined he might do such a thing. . . . And he was no longer the young man coming home to his wife after years of war, vowing not to be ground down by routine, to stay open to the possibility of an ecstatic life.” His is a diminished, disappointed life devoted to fitting “around someone driven and intransigent.”

Harry believes the words of a favourite sonnet (Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks / But bears it out even to the edge of doom) and the sentiment is true in his case: “He had loved her all his adult life, long after the gloss of their youth and its illusions had been worn away and left them with the essentials of who they were, along with a collection of sometimes contradictory memories … He had never denied her anything, material or emotional, that he could provide.” Evelyn’s decisions in their waning years suggests that her feelings have changed; in fact, even during the war years, when Harry is “low and worn out” and writes about his “dark thoughts,” she is not understanding: “this Harry was not exactly like the one she remembered. This man was less practical, less positive, and less affectionate.” Their daughters tell Harry that “he was too accommodating with Evelyn” but “he didn’t see it just as giving in. It was doing what he could to make things work. He could bend, she could not.” He also fears that if he had stood up to her, “he would have lost her, and that was unthinkable.” Evelyn, however, interprets his constant accommodations as a sign of weakness and she dislikes “compromise, weakness, vagueness.”

Evelyn is not easy to like. She is such a self-centred and domineering person who is never satisfied. At the beginning Harry loves Evelyn’s strong-mindedness: “one of the things he loved about Evelyn was her fierce pride, her willingness to argue even when the facts were against her, to interrupt, to refuse, to insist-.” Later, when he is especially frustrated with his job and speaks without thinking, these traits are turned against him and he realizes “How very sensitive Evelyn is to . . . any criticism or lack of respect, whether real or perceived. How, thinking herself slighted, she will put everything she has into self-defence. How she can be vicious.” As she ages, “She had become more intensely herself . . . she understood duty and believed in it, yet in practice found it intolerable … When she wanted something, it drove her. She experienced her own feelings with great intensity, but often failed to accept those of others, especially if they differed from hers.”

Despite this negative portrayal, it is possible to have some sympathy for Evelyn. She enjoyed her work at a law firm but was dismissed once she married. She is not prepared for her role as a wife; she has to learn how to cook and thinks of the house as something she must put “under control,” so much so that she detests Harry’s collection of books because of “the fussy, old-fashioned effect it gave a room, especially since his book jackets did not match.” She struggles with motherhood; one of her daughters says, “’She’s just not a natural carer.’” When she speaks to her doctor about some concerns, he is rather dismissive. Then there’s a late pregnancy which she didn’t want. And there is no doubt that her father’s alcoholism had a long-lasting effect on her life; certainly, his behaviour and her mother’s reactions help account for Evelyn’s need to be in control.

This is a novel of character which is breathtakingly realistic. I understand why it won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Page’s other novels have also been nominated for prestigious awards, so I will be checking them out.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).½

Rating: 3.5

“It was not as if he lacked backbone. He had withstood schoolyard bullies, the Germans, and countless liars and fools at work. Evelyn, though, was a different matter. Part of the problem was that he didn’t see it just as giving in. It was doing what he could to make things work. He could bend, she could not.”

Dear Evelyn is the story of the long marriage of Evelyn and Harry Miles, born and raised “between two wars in dense London streets, by a river channelled in concrete and topped with industrial froth, the air thick with the clatter and smoke of the railway, with the smells of the brewery and the factories where most people of their class were expected to work.” On the brink of World War II, the two accidentally meet on the steps of the Battersea Library. Evelyn drops a book; Harry picks it up and, caught almost immediately “in a great tide of longing,” offers to walk her home. The two talk as they go, and Harry ironically tells Evelyn he doesn’t care for routine, he doesn’t like being told what to do, and he has a hard time holding his tongue—all things he will spend the better part of his life having to do—with her. When they pass a number of “grand Victorian villas,” Evelyn exclaims: “Imagine living in one of those!” Harry will later identify that moment as the decisive one, when he determined he’d commit himself to making Evelyn happy.

Not long after, the two are married. Soon Harry is off to war, fighting in Tunisia, while Evelyn moves from London to the country—with her infant daughter, Lillian. Harry writes long, sometimes lyrical letters to Evelyn—he has a literary bent and is a great lover of poetry, which sometimes works for him as a kind of medicine. Harry’s early letters are full of the longing of a young man in love; in the later ones, he is prone to dark thoughts and is weary of war. He writes more for himself than for her, Evelyn thinks dismissively, as she sets one such letter aside. (She will never appreciate that he has an inner life.) She has her own wartime challenges, of course: She chooses rough conditions and manual labour on a wartime Gloucester farm rather than lodge in the city with her parents—her long-suffering, self-abnegating mother and her alcoholic, tubercular wastrel of a father. Her mother would only criticize Evelyn for her hasty marriage, and her father’s germs might infect baby Lillian. Both Harry and Evelyn encounter wartime “temptations” yet remain faithful.

Upon Harry’s return from Africa, the two can finally have an everyday domestic life. Harry wants “to love passionately,” go beyond himself, and “perhaps even to write.” He works hard to provide for his family, studying on weekends to improve his employment prospects. They have a second daughter, Valerie, and eventually, in early middle age, a third, Louise— trouble from the moment she’s conceived. In that third, resented pregnancy, Evelyn is stricken with intense morning sickness; she’s moody, irrational, a loose cannon—her essential intransigence is magnified. She would prefer not to have this baby, but it’s 1960, and the baby is born.

Harry oversees the building of a large house in the suburbs—at some distance from where he and Evelyn grew up. It’s what Evelyn wants, of course, and it signals the family’s rise from working to middle class, but it comes at a cost. Eldest daughter Lily observes that the upkeep of the new house consumes time the family used to spend on outings. Evelyn’s mother, May, laments that she can’t easily pop around to see her grand-daughters—but, then, May is always dissatisfied anyway. Harry considers it’ll take him forty years to pay down the debt. Yes, as much as Harry takes pride in being a good provider, he periodically chafes against the constraints of family life. At times, he longs for the freedom of an unsettled life. Always overriding this, however, is the need to keep Evelyn onside, to please her, and smooth over the difficulties. And Evelyn is certainly difficult. I found it hard to understand how anyone could love such a person. Reading page after page about her was more than enough for me. Good looks and “magnetism” apparently go quite a long way for some.

At one point, Harry reads a biography of Edwardian poet, Edward Thomas, and finds that the marital experience of the poet’s wife, Helen, resonates for him. Like her, Harry has had the task of “fitting . . . [himself] around someone driven and intransigent.” But Harry also has his blind spots. He is, for example, unaware that Evelyn, though conventional and rigid, also struggles at times with her domestic role and thinks back longingly to the time before her marriage when she was praised for her correspondence and reception work at a London law firm.

Initially, I had trouble warming to Page’s novel. I’m not crazy about wartime stories or epistolary novels, and that’s what this book at first seemed to be. (It actually wasn’t) However, the main problem for me was Evelyn, an utterly infuriating, self-centred character, quite unable to recognize the needs of anyone beyond herself. Harry’s love, his weird psychological enslavement to her, seemed a curse of almost mythical proportions: “Evelyn was some kind of goddess, and he was just a man.” There is, as well, a slightly distant, cinematic quality to Page’s work. She provides some wonderfully precise period, location, and domestic details which anchor her book in time, but I felt I was often watching Page’s protagonists rather than engaging with them emotionally. I also found the novel overly long by perhaps 50 to 75 pages. I think the same themes could have been communicated with greater economy.

Dear Evelyn initially reads less like a novel than a series of chronological, linked short stories, but, at around the halfway point, that changed—for me, at least. By then I had a better feel for Page’s style and for what she might be trying to do: that is, present a study of a marriage; show a couple, individually and together, across time, at certain critical or emotionally significant moments in their relationship. Page’s is a rich and insightful novel that is infused with poetry and literary references. Like the best literature, it feels true—especially in its communication of the idea that people do not change; they just become more and more themselves. In the end, however, this was a book I could admire only. Something—likely too much Evelyn—held me back from love.½

Two people from very different backgrounds, Scott and Anna, come together unexpectedly. Scott works in the hotel in the community where he has grown up – although he wishes for a change in his life, he sees no prospect of it; Anna is a palaeontologist, about to embark on a dig to excavate a fossil pterosaur. In a chance meeting, though, they seem drawn to each other – perhaps because they recognise each other’s history of family problems – and Anna tells Scott her secret fear, that she will succumb to the hereditary Huntingdon’s Disease that killed her father. A bond established between them, Anna invites Scott to work as a volunteer on the dig, essentially to be her personal assistant in case she shows any symptoms of the disease. Scott, desperate to get away from his alcoholic father without actually deserting him, seizes an opportunity to get him into a rehab home, and embarks on his new role despite his lack of confidence. Most of the other workers on the dig accept him in a friendly fashion, though there are tensions because the excavation has been divided into two sections to accommodate, Mike Swenson, an ex-colleague of Anna’s. This division is a cause of conflict first between Anna and Mike, then the two teams and eventually between the scientists and protestors from the local First Nations band, the St’alkwextsihn – this is land which is the subject of treaty negotiations. Scott’s own allegiances are divided since his mother was a band member and he has grown up with the protestors, but as the protegé of the scientists he can also see the value of their work. Mike wants simply to over-ride the protest, but Anna is anxious to find a compromise.

Much of the story turns on patterns of things not easily seen – the traces in the shale which may indicate the presence of the pterosaur, the patterns of deterioration and the gene markers which may demonstrate that Anna has the disease: patterns of small things which once discerned, point to a larger whole. There are, too, patterns of family history, and the patterns of conflict played out between First Nations and colonisers, and even, at a mundane level, between men and women. A crucial theme is of the integral nature of the land, its inhabitants and its stories – to local band members, the removal of the fossil to a distant museum is a rape not only of the land but also of their culture: “Museums are where they put the remains of what has been overrun,” says one of them. The pterosaur is a bird ancestor, and part of the land. This theme is one that has had to be addressed in Canada, where Indigenous Peoples now form part of the consultation process for museum curation and it is familiar to see notices on exhibits to the effect that all or part of the display is unavailable because it is in use. The removal of human remains is even more contentious, of course, and there has been another case in the news recently of remains being returned to their place of origin for burial.

The Find is a thoughtful book, handling its difficult issues with tact and sensitivity. I felt that it was perhaps a little overlong – the period after the dig becomes somewhat episodic, and I thought might have benefited from some more judicious editing, but the chapters covering the excavation itself were really gripping. A book more about ideas than events, with sympathetic characterisation which uses two difficult issues to illuminate each other.½

Interesting, well written, dramatic, but carries you along with the tale of a strange Finnish sect

This was a surprisingly good book. I had reservations about whether the day to day life of a murderer in jail and his experience of education and counseling in the system would sustain interest but it is actually quite riveting. I read it very quickly. I had the same reservations about James Frey's book about a drug addict in treatment but it also sustained interest. Turns out of course that it was really more of a novel but I am comparing reading experiences here.