Ursula Bentley’s The Angel of Twickenham is a mildly
amusing, occasionally clever social satire on Britain in the last
years of Margaret Thatcher’s rule. It is also a complete failure
as a work of fiction. Centred on the chaotic breakdown of a family,
it is too flippant to be deemed a serious work, yet lacks any
of the human warmth necessary for a genuine comedy.
Its heroine Harriet Flunkel is a middle-aged actress and mother
who spends her time trying to juggle the conflicting commitments
of work and family from within the confines of a cosily liberal,
middle-class existence. This is a common enough situation, and
as George Eliot said, ‘let us always have men ready to give the
loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace
things’. Bentley seems to follow this dictate to the letter, and
her novel is crammed with the minutiae of life in Thatcher’s Britain:
West End musicals, the Daily Mail, Torville and Dean,
the unreliability of British Rail, and so on. Her talent for period
detail is impeccable. However, Eliot’s statement continues: ‘Let
us always have… men who see beauty in these commonplace things.’
And this is where Bentley fails. She sees, or at least portrays,
beauty in nothing. Her perspective is jaded and snobbish and her
characters are devoid of all warmth and sympathy. Harriet, rather
than seeming confused and divided, comes across as merely selfish
and slightly unbalanced. Her husband has been given no distinguishing
features whatsoever (apart from the fact that he is American),
and one is at pains to work out exactly what is his place in the
novel. All too often Bentley takes refuge in stereotypes. For
example, Harriet’s lazy, beautiful and hysterical French au pair
girl, or Adelina Viper, the skinny, highbrow vamp of a novelist.
Or the ‘charismatic’ evangelical priest turned seducer. These
characters go little beyond the realms of sketchy cliché.
Technically, Ursula Bentley is not an altogether bad writer. Her
prose is sophisticated, even sometimes elegant, and her satire
can be sharp. She continually frustrates, however, as whenever
the narrative moves close to a potentially complex and interesting
situation or a relationship threatens to become emotionally involving,
she slams on the brakes and reverts hastily back to superficiality
and cheap jokes. When the novel finally does reach the climax
of its action, it comes too late. The reader has lost interest,
and the interaction between the characters has not been sufficiently
strong for it to sustain the shock of the novel’s somewhat bizarre
conclusion.
In The Angel of Twickenham, Bentley presents Thatcherite
Britain as soulless, selfish, jingoistic, anti-aesthetic and vehemently
anti-intellectual. This will be seen by many as an accurate portrayal.
However, much as those values might have made up the ethos of
Thatcher’s reign, they cannot be seen as representative of the
people that lived under it. Bentley’s book contains none of the
basic humanist values that make a study of ordinary life worth
reading. In allowing her fondness for acerbic wit to dominate
this book, she has created something that is both cynical and
dull. Perhaps something that resembles the culture of Thatcherism
more than she might have intended.
Reviewed by Polly Rance
