The evening began with a discussion about the two editions of the book currently available: the lovely new Virago edition, the cover of which is from an old Yorkshire railway poster, and the television tie-in edition which is published by another company.  We were all rather surprised to learn that the BBC edition wasn’t from Virago, but apparently since Winifred Holtby has been dead for more than seventy years, South Riding is now in the public domain and can therefore be published by anyone.  However, Vera Brittain’s estate gave Virago permission to use an afterward that she wrote which hasn’t been published since the 1930′s (if my memory serves me correctly) and their version also features an introduction by Shirley Williams, Vera Brittain’s daughter, so it’s worth choosing this edition for the extra material alone, not to mention the vastly superior cover.  We all agreed that we prefer not to buy television tie-in editions with actors on the cover as we prefer to imagine the characters ourselves rather than to have a preconceived idea of what they look like before we begin to read.

Interestingly (and unusually) I seemed to be the only person there who had watched the recent BBC adaptation of South Riding.  I had enjoyed it for what it was, but it wasn’t a patch on the book because it had to take a much more narrow focus than the novel, essentially turning it into a love story with a bit of social reform thrown in.  I think that this is partly because of the time constraints of adapting such a wide-reaching novel into three hour long segments and partly because I just don’t think it would have worked on the screen.  As we discussed, one of the most impressive things about this book is that Winifred Holtby takes so many different characters from a huge range of backgrounds and professions and makes them all individuals that the reader knows personally and who have fascinating stories to tell.  To have so many characters in a television programme would just have been confusing, rather than providing the amazing cross-section of society that it does in the book.

We chatted a bit about how we had all come to read the book; some people had read it when they were younger and then read it again for the Book Club, but the majority of us had only discovered it because of the Book Club and so were suitably grateful!  People tried to come up with a book that we would say that South Riding is most like in order to describe it to other people who haven’t yet heard of it.  Middlemarch of course was mentioned (making me all the more eager to get round to reading it myself) and also the Rabbit books by John Updike which I’ve not investigated before.  I wish I’d noted them down at the time, because anything that purports to be like South Riding (and indeed, anything recommended by the lovely people at the meeting) has to be worth reading.

We also discussed Winifred Holtby’s relationships with the two incredibly strong and influential women in her life: her mother and Vera Brittain.  We were read some extracts from a biography of Winifred Holtby called The Clear Stream by Marion Shaw which sounds fascinating and is now lurking in my Amazon shopping basket waiting for me to feel justified in buying books again to click and purchase, as it’s apparently no longer in print and is quite pricey second hand.  Both were clearly women that Winifred respected, almost to the point of denying her own talents in deference to theirs; there was a particularly interesting exceprt from a letter than Winifred wrote to Vera saying that the fact that Winifred had been asked to write a biography of Virginia Woolf was obviously a reflection on her friendship with Vera rather than on her own personal merits as an author and journalist.  It’s no wonder that she was like this given her mother, who seems to have been a formidable character who liked to be in control of her daughter.  We’re all very thankful that Winifred Holtby ignored her mother’s displeasure to write South Riding and that Vera Brittain ensured that it was published.

I left having had a wonderful evening, clutching a copy of the new Virago reissue of Anderby Wold, Winifred Holtby’s first novel.  I started it on the train home and have now devoured it completely, so thank you to Virago for organising another lovely event and for introducing me to such a great author.

We Had It So Good is the only book of Linda Grant’s that I’ve read, and so it was difficult to try to guess what she might be like from just this one experience; it turns out that she is warm, lively, very entertaining to hear speak and the owner of some eminently covetable shoes.  The evening started with Linda passing around a photograph of herself and some friends in Venice in the 1970′s and reading some letters that she had written to a friend around that time (rather brave considering how frank they were) to provide some context for Stephen and Andrea, the book’s main characters.  After we’d all had a chuckle at the 70′s fashions, music and attitudes that the letters and picture recalled (and a small detour regarding The Archers’ book club), we settled down to listen to Linda answering questions from her editor, Lennie Goodings, with frequent interjections from the enthusiastic audience members.  It was a lovely, friendly informal occasion and I learned a lot.

Linda started by explaining what inspired the book which, appropriately enough for this book, was a combination of personal and political factors.  On the one hand, a chance meeting with an old hippie acquaintance who now runs a million pound advertising business made her curious as to how someone got from a to b like that, and on the other the incidents of September 11th caused her to look back at her generation and think, as the title says, we had it so good.  She went on to talk about the characters (Max was our universal favourite) and expressed her concerns that a lot of reviews (my own included, to a certain extent) were overly concerned about whether the characters were likeable or not, an issue which is really besides the point of the novel.  I think we all like to like the people we read about (if you’ll pardon the overuse of ‘like’ there) but would agree that it’s not necessarily an issue as long as they are interesting in their unlikeability.  Besides, the point was made that the novel takes place over such a long period that you would never like a person continually or agree with all their choices over an equivalent time period in real life, so why should we expect to in a book?  The main point is that characters should be credible, engage the reader and provoke a reaction.

The most interesting part of the evening was definitely learning about the writing process and the decisions that Linda had made when writing and revising the book.  Apparently the chapter which holds the key to understanding the outspoken, unlikeable Grace (ah, I’m back to liking again) was originally Grace’s first chapter, rather than placed at the end as a shocking revelation as it is in the published edition.  It was moved to the end for greater impact, but she says that even now she isn’t sure which placement works best and that the chapter could go in either place.  Also fascinating was her decision not to have the novel follow quite the trajectory that she had initially intended, with Max or Marianne being killed or wounded in the September 11th attacks.  This was a change that she made after the child of a close friend was seriously injured in a similar attack, and she felt that to write about it with the insider knowledge that she shouldn’t have would be exploitative and wrong, so instead tragedy happens off to the side and is not the main focus of the novel.  It was wonderful to learn of such a sensitive decision full of integrity, even if it does mean that We Had It So Good is, in her opinion, not the book it would have been had her original idea been followed through.

In true book club fashion the evening began and ended with copious quantities of cake, possibly more than the people at Virago had intended after someone who had been unable to attend the event dropped off a very impressive cake in the shape of Linda’s book!  I left having had a thoroughly good time, with a greater understanding of We Had It So Good, a desire to read another of Linda Grant’s books (probably The Clothes on Their Backs which was mentioned quite a lot and sounds rather good), and a canvas bag containing a proof copy of an upcoming book (particularly welcome given the current embargo on book buying).  For pictures from the evening, take a look at Virago’s blog post.  Thanks very much to the Virago team for organising such an interesting event and for inviting me along.

We Had It So Good is the story of Stephen and his family.  Born in America to a Cuban mother and Polish father, Stephen gains a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford in the 1960′s.  There he meets Grace, Andrea and Ivan and together they take a lot of drugs and talk about how they could change the world until Stephen is drafted by the American army to fight in Vietnam.  In order to avoid what he sees as certain death, he marries Andrea and they move to a squat in London while Grace disappears to travel the world.  As they grow up, settle down and have children, their concerns change and they become more and more detached from their idealistic younger selves.

Had this not been a book club pick I would almost certainly never have read it.  Aging hippies becoming increasingly middle aged and middle class isn’t really my thing, and I still think that after reading Grant’s book.  Perhaps I’m just too far removed from that time period and way of thinking (I’m even younger than Stephen and Andrea’s children in the novel) for it to have any resonance with me; I’m sure this would be a far more interesting book for someone who had lived through the same experiences and developed in a similar way to the central characters.  As it was, I found them to be intensely irritating, although I had flashes of sympathy for them from time to time, particularly in the way that Andrea’s story was concluded.  This might have been intentional, I don’t know, but it didn’t make the book a particularly enjoyable read for me.

Far more interesting, in my opinion, are the peripheral characters.  I thought that Grant manages to inject really intriguing character traits into Max, Marianne and the various parents who appear throughout the book.  All of them are distinct and different and I wish that more time had been given to them and to their concerns rather than to the ineffectual, dissatisfied Stephen and Andrea, although obviously these two represent the framework which holds all of the others together.  I thought that Grace’s sections, while initially confusing (who is this disembodied first person narrator suddenly having a chapter?  Why?) were effective and, once it was revealed why they were there, a clever way of weaving her own story into the main body of the novel and showing how everything was intertwined.

One thing that was a new experience for me with this book was reading about events that I’ve lived through.  A quick glance at my book list will tell you that I don’t read a lot of contemporary fiction, so it was a real change to read something that goes right up to the present day.  I thought that Grant tackles this skilfully, allowing the reader to instantly recognise what is going on and which crucial world events have occurred without ever being obvious about it.  September 11th, for example, is mentioned without the date or the words ‘World Trade Centre’ being used and yet it is abundantly clear what has just happened.  Likewise with the July 7th bombings on the London Underground.

On the whole I found the writing in We Had It So Good to be effective and well thought out, even if the story wasn’t exactly my cup of tea.  There was, however, one stylistic device that I found incredibly annoying and that is the use of occasional chapters or sometimes just individual paragraphs in the present tense for no discernible reason.  I could understand it (although I would still find it irritating) if the change in tense reflected a shift to more immediate concerns or continuous actions, but the present tense paragraphs seem to be largely random and have no particular significance.  I’m willing to concede that I missed something integral here, but nonetheless I found them jarring and wished that Grant had stuck to writing in one tense to show the present tense of the novel.

We Had It So Good by Linda Grant.  Published by Virago, 2010, pp. 345.  First edition.