The Catherine Wheel

April 27, 2015
First published in Australia in 1960, Harrower’s (In Certain Circles) novel now comes to the U.S. for the first time. Clemency, a young Australian law student living in a London bedsit, moves through her life with great control. She feels a measured passion for Christian, a failed actor whom Clemency tutors in French—which spurs the jealousy of Olive, the older woman Christian has taken up with. Thus begins the central tension of the novel, a cat and mouse game of relenting and withholding. Clemency, a self-described “student of human nature,” feels a “sweet ferocious calm,” which is also an apt description of Harrower’s writing—it’s consistently restrained, even when describing love, deception, and failure. Though the narrative offers some suspenseful questions—whether or not Christian is really in love with her plays out within a hundred dreary French lessons, as Clemency drinks tea and quietly wavers in her moral resolve—Harrower is most concerned in the psychological peculiarities of her small cast of characters. Indeed, the action rarely moves to Clemency’s bedroom, and the reader is led to believe that the bleakness of the room is a protracted metaphor for the bleakness of 1950s London. At times, Clemency’s emotional distance can be witty, as when she dryly observes of Christian, “This must be what they called personality.” Other times, however, the adjective-drunk quality of Harrower’s writing makes it difficult to maintain a real interest in her self-destructive characters.

Starred review from May 15, 2015
The latest reissue from the author of In Certain Circles (2014) and The Watch Tower (1966). First published in 1960, Harrower's third novel evokes both Victorian melodrama and contemporary realism. Clemency James has moved from Sydney to London to study for the bar. She's independent and committed to creating her own future, but she's also an extravagant narrator, much given to philosophical pronouncements and exclamation points. Harrower's prose would be entirely too much if Clem weren't aware of her own tendency toward "flashy moods and temperament." This heroine meets something like her match in Christian Roland, the failed actor employed by her landlady as a window washer and night watchman. As an outsider, Clem is a keen observer of how class operates in midcentury England. In Australia, her fine winter coat suggested nothing more than the fact that she could afford it. In London, it speaks of a pedigree that she cannot claim. She lives in a shabby but not disreputable London bedsit and gives French lessons in order to augment a small inheritance from her father. It's this awareness of her own ambiguous outsider status that initially makes Clem susceptible to Christian's charms. She recognizes his flattery-and self-flattery-as a kind of performance; nevertheless, she doesn't want to be perceived as a snob. She recognizes that she's playing a part in her interactions with Chris, but she can't seem to resist the play. And then there's Olive....The woman presented as Chris' wife is decades his senior and herself a figure of pantomime. Clem understands that her role in this story is unlikely to be a happy one. She embraces it not as an innocent but as a modern woman willing to experience-and survive-old tropes. Rich and rewarding.

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