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WORK TITLE: Shy Creatures
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CITY: London, England
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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PERSONAL
Born 1966, in south east London; married; children: three.
EDUCATION:Oxford University, B.A. (English), 1988.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, school administrator, and a university tutor. André Deutsch publishing, secretary, fiction and non-fiction editor; University of Kent, Royal Literary Fund Fellow, 2020.
AWARDS:Romantic Novelists’ Association, best novel award, 1999, and Parker Romantic Novel of the Year award, both for Learning to Swim.
WRITINGS
Learning to Swim was adapted as a Radio 4 play.
SIDELIGHTS
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Born in south east London in 1966, Clare Chambers studied English at Oxford University and spent the year after graduation in New Zealand, where she taught and wrote her first novel, Uncertain Terms, published when she was 25. She was an editorial secretary, then editor of fiction and nonfiction at independent literary publishers André Deutsch, which published her first novel. She went on to publish romantic comedies that garnered accolades.
Chambers’ coming-of-age novel Learning to Swim, published in 1998, received the best novel award from the Romantic Novelists’ Association. At a charity concert, cellist Abigail Jex bumps into an old friend, Marcus “Rad” Radley. After some awkward chat, the story flashes back thirteen years to when the two were teenagers. Abigail becomes school chums with classmate Frances Radley and visits her house often. An only child with conservative parents, Abigail finds the bohemian life of the Radley family refreshing. She eventually meets and falls for Frances’ brilliant and handsome, but also aimless, older brother Rad. After a series of events that end in tragedy, Abigail and Rad part, until the chance encounter as adults. Now old feelings are rekindled and the two wonder how their future will go.
Learning to Swim also was named Parker Romantic Novel of the Year. Chairman and judge Derek Parker, said about the Chambers’ win that readers of romantic fiction “tend to like their heroines pure and their heroes swashbuckling. First and foremost they should be good books, though it is an essential that the novel pricks the heart. And the writer that brought the tear closest to the lash was Clare Chambers,” according to reporter Fiachra Gibbons in Guardian. Writing online at A Work in Progress, Dani Torres remarked: “it’s about family and friendship, as well as love and second chances. Chambers is an excellent writer, and the story is funny and clever, but never in an obnoxious, self-conscious way that clever books can sometimes be.”
After her eighth book, the 2011 Burning Secrets, Chambers took a 10-year hiatus from writing, then tried a new track—gaining inspiration from real-life news stories. In 2021 she published her ninth novel, Small Pleasures, based on true events. In 1957 in postwar England, spinster Jean Swinney, approaching 40, is a reporter for the North Kent Echo newspaper, relegated to articles that appeal to housewives. Her life is equally dull, caring for her demanding, agoraphobic widowed mother. After the paper prints an article about parthenogenesis in animals, Gretchen Tilbury contacts Jean, claiming that her 10-year-old daughter was a virgin birth. Desperate for connection, Jean becomes close with Gretchen, acts as a surrogate mother to Margaret, and develops feelings for Gretchen’s husband Howard.
Chambers told Robert Lee Brewer at Writer’s Digest that she was inspired by a radio story 20 years ago about a German woman living in the U.K. who claimed to have a virgin birth. Chambers set the piece is postwar Britain. She said: “I hope readers will find something pleasing in the atmosphere and detail of 1950s suburban life and feel sympathy for the characters, who are each in their own way victims of frustrated potential.”
“Chambers plays fair with Gretchen’s mystery, tenderly illuminating the hidden yearnings of small lives,” declared a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. Although a Kirkus Reviews writer noted that the author may not provide comfortable solutions, nevertheless, “Chambers acknowledges a broad range of human experience. Jean’s foibles, along with those of her irksome mother and other characters, are presented with sympathy.” In New York Times Book Review, Virginia Feito remarked: “Chambers reproduces the everyday minutiae of postwar British suburbia… Her language is beautiful, achieving what only the most skilled writers can: big pleasure wrought from small details.”
Chambers’ quirky but profound 2024 Shy Creatures, based on real events, is set in a dour 1964. Helen Hansford, 34, is an art therapist at the Westbury Park psychiatric hospital in Croydon. She’s having an affair with married doctor Gil Rudden. She encounters a new patient, William Tapping, 37, who was brought in after his caretaker aunt passed away. With a long beard and hair, William had been closed up in his aunt’s house for decades, never going out and never speaking, but he is found to be very intelligent and a talented artist. In alternating chapters, William’s history is revealed through Helen’s investigation, and she struggles with determining her own future. The story was based on a real man in 1952 in Bristol, UK.
According to Guardian critic Joanna Briscoe, “Chambers’s exquisite prose is a consistent pleasure, while the acuity of her observation possesses beauty and universality.” In Kirkus Reviews, a writer declared: “More persuasive is the mood, redolent of post-war adjustments, and Chambers’ quiet but precise observations of circumstance (often drab), options, and individuals.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2021, review of Small Pleasures; November 1, 2024, review of Shy Creatures.
New York Times Book Review, November 28, 2021, Virginia Feito, review of Small Pleasures, p. 19(L).
Publishers Weekly, August 30, 2021, review of Small Pleasures, p. 32; September 23, 2024, Louisa Ermelino, “Ghosts of the Past: In Mining Mysteries and Scandals of the Last Century, Clare Chambers Hopes to Deeply Connect with Modern Readers.:
ONLINE
A Work in Progress, https://danitorres.typepad.com/ (July 31, 2009), Dani Torres, review of Learning to Swim.
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (April 21, 1999), Fiachra Gibbons, “Prize Tale of Bickering in Bed,” review of Learning to Swim; (August 24, 2024), Joanna Briscoe, review of Shy Creatures.
Writers Digest, https://www.writersdigest.com/ (October 15, 2021), Robert Lee Brewer, “Chambers: On Starting Fresh and Switching Gears.”
Clare Chambers was born in south east London in 1966. She studied English at Oxford and spent the year after graduating in New Zealand, where she wrote her first novel, Uncertain Terms, published when she was 25. She has since written eight further novels, including Learning to Swim (Century 1998) which won the Romantic Novelists’ Association best novel award and was adapted as a Radio 4 play, and In a Good Light (Century 2004) which was longlisted for the Whitbread best novel prize.
Clare began her career as a secretary at the publisher André Deutsch, when Diana Athill was still at the helm. They not only published her first novel, but made her type her own contract. In due course she went on to become a fiction and non-fiction editor there herself, until leaving to raise a family and concentrate on her own writing. Some of the experiences of working for an eccentric, independent publisher in the pre-digital era found their way into her novel The Editor’s Wife (Century, 2007). When her three children were teenagers, inspired by their reading habits, she produced two YA novels, Bright Girls (HarperCollins 2009) and Burning Secrets (HarperCollins 2011).
Her most recent novel is Small Pleasures (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020).
She takes up a post as Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Kent in September 2020.
She lives with her husband in south east London and generally has her nose in a book.
Clare Chambers: On Starting Fresh and Switching Gears
Award-winning author Clare Chambers discusses the fear and excitement of switching genre gears in her new historical fiction novel, Small Pleasures.
Robert Lee BrewerOct 15, 2021
Clare Chambers studied English at Oxford and spent the year after graduating in New Zealand, where she wrote her first novel, Uncertain Terms, published when she was 25. She has since written eight subsequent novels, including Learning to Swim, which was adapted as a Radio 4 play, and In a Good Light, which was long-listed for the Whitbread Best Novel prize. She worked as a fiction and nonfiction editor at Andre Deutsch until leaving to raise a family and concentrate on her own writing. She lives with her family in southeast London and generally has her nose in a book. Find her on Twitter.
Clare Chambers: On Starting Fresh and Switching Gears
Clare Chambers
In this post, Clare discusses the decade-long wait to writing her new historical fiction novel, Small Pleasures, the fear and excitement of switching genre gears, and more!
Name: Clare Chambers
Literary agent: Judith Murray UK; Grainne Fox US
Book title: Small Pleasures
Publisher: Custom House/William Morrow
Release date: 12 October 2021
Previous titles: Learning to Swim, In a Good Light, The Editor’s Wife (published in U.K. not U.S.)
Elevator pitch for the book: 1957: Jean Swinney, a reporter for a local paper in suburban south London, is tasked with investigating a young woman who claims to have experienced a virgin birth. As she becomes involved with the woman, her husband, and daughter, Jean’s life of quiet desperation is miraculously transformed.
small_pleasures_a_novel_by_clare_chambers_book_cover_image
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What prompted you to write this book?
I heard a piece on the radio about 20 years ago about a German woman living in the UK who claimed to be a Virgin mother. In 1956, doctors were unable to disprove her claim and the case was a tabloid sensation. It struck me as a fascinating basis for a novel.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
It was about 15 years after I first heard of the case that I actually started to think seriously about writing it. I was used to writing romantic comedy and this was such a departure for me. It was when I read about a local rail disaster that took place in the same period, that I realized how I could tell the story.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
It was a series of pleasant surprises. I had expected that at my age, with my poor sales record, and having been unpublished for 10 years, that I would be untouchable by the industry. It was heartening that this wasn’t the case—the book was snapped up in the U.K. and by publishers around the world—including the U.S., the fulfillment of a dream for me—and it has completely revived my career.
Clare Chambers: On Starting Fresh and Switching Gears
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I completely changed my working method for this book. Instead of allowing the story to develop organically as I went along, I planned every inch of it before I started. The surprise was how much better that system worked—how liberating it was to have that scaffolding there to support me.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope readers will find something pleasing in the atmosphere and detail of 1950s suburban life and feel sympathy for the characters, who are each in their own way victims of frustrated potential.
If you could share one piece of advice with other authors, what would it be?
You can’t control how your book will be received or what will capture the public imagination. The only thing you have any control over is your own writing—so I try to focus on improving as a writer and producing a book that is as perfect as it can be, whatever happens to it.
Exclusive Interview with Clare Chambers
By She Writes Editors|November 2024|Categories: Author Interviews, Columns|Tags: November 2024 Issue
Clare Chambers is an acclaimed author of nine novels, including Learning to Swim, winner of the Romantic Novelists’ Association award, and In a Good Light, longlisted for the Whitbread best novel prize. She began her career at André Deutsch as a secretary and later became an editor, an experience that inspired her novel The Editor’s Wife. Her recent works include Small Pleasures (2020) and the forthcoming Shy Creatures. Clare lives in southeast London with her husband .
Tell us about your recent book, Shy Creatures.
Shy Creatures is set in a large progressive 1960s psychiatric hospital in the suburbs of London and it concerns the relationship between an art therapist called Helen and a non-verbal patient called William who was discovered living in a semi-feral state, as a recluse or a prisoner, with his elderly aunt, unknown to the outside world for over twenty years. When it emerges that he is a gifted artist, Helen comes to see his salvation as something of a personal project. In the process her own private and professional life become somewhat compromised with nearly disastrous consequences.
We are in the year 1964 – an interesting time for psychiatry and society. Change is all around – the old pieties are being swept away by youth culture, pop music, the pill, the end of national service. Times are a-changing, but for my characters, just too old to benefit, looking on at this brave new world with some alarm, the sixties are definitely not swinging.
Buy the book now: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
What was the inspiration behind your most recent book? How do you find those sparks of creativity when you’re starting something new?
The character of William was based on a true story that I came across in a newspaper archive while I was researching Small Pleasures. A man called Harry Tucker was discovered in 1952 living in a house in Bristol with his Aunt, in a squalid state, under the radar of neighbours and the authorities. They were removed to a psychiatric hospital and seemed to be making good progress. Sadly, a newspaper report a year later recorded his death by drowning in a nearby river. I became preoccupied by his sad fate and decided to write him a past and a more hopeful future.
As a writer who explores themes like family, relationships, and societal norms, do you find yourself drawing on personal experiences, or do you delve into extensive research?
Where I am writing about areas beyond my expertise and experience, like 1960s psychiatric hospitals for example, I do extensive research. This is no chore – it is my interest in the subject that drives my determination to write about it. I do lots of background reading, from books, academic journals, contemporary diaries, newspaper archives, most of which never finds its way into the books, but is there underneath in support, like the bottom 5/6 of an iceberg. For the suburban settings, the domestic sphere and matters of the heart and those feelings and experiences which are unchanging and universal – I draw on my own life and the histories of my family and friends.
Your novel Small Pleasures brought you to a new level of recognition. Could you share a bit about what your journey to publication looked like?
Small Pleasures was my 9th novel and came after a decade of being unpublished. I had written six books for adults and two for teenagers since my early twenties, but although enthusiastically received by their few readers, none had sold in any quantity and were now mostly unavailable. The book before Small Pleasures took me four years to write and was turned down by my publisher which led to a year or so of despondency and wound-licking before I regathered my confidence in writing again. With the encouragement of a new agent, I revisited an old idea that I had been incubating since 2001 about a woman claiming to be a Virgin Mother. Based on a true story, and set in the 1950s, this was a new departure for me and it felt like the last throw of the dice, career-wise. I thought as a 50+ woman with a poor track record of sales, I would never be published again. I was surprised and delighted to find the industry more forgiving than I had feared, and in 2019 three UK publishers offered for the novel.
Many new authors face the myth of the “overnight success.” Can you talk about your experience with that concept and what it was like navigating the ups and downs of your writing career?
It is amusing to hear one’s labours of over 30 years described as an overnight success. Small Pleasures took off gently, not like a rocket. It was bought for a modest sum and did not make the bestseller lists as a hardback, but it was warmly reviewed in all the important places and there was some sympathy for my re-emergence from literary obscurity. And gradually it began to sell and be discussed and recommended on social media, and bought by foreign publishers, and word-of-mouth did what it can do only in the internet age, and at last I had a prize-winning book on my hands. I feel very lucky that success has come closer to the end than the beginning of my career, when I can enjoy it without worrying whether it will last.
From your experience, what do you think the publishing world gets wrong about the concept of an “overnight success”? How does this narrative affect new writers?
I think the emphasis placed on debuts to be the next big thing puts unfair pressure on them and is by any measure bizarre. In what other profession is inexperience regarded as such a huge positive? No one says ‘Yay, I’ve got this debut surgeon fresh out of college about to open up my cranium!’ Writers and artists of all kinds have to be given time to practise and hone their craft and should, ideally, improve over time.
What role has persistence played in your writing career? Can you share a time when you were close to giving up but chose to keep going?
After the failure of my four-year project I was very low indeed. Four years is a long time to waste without earning any money or achieving any creative fulfilment. I seriously wondered whether it was time to accept that I was an ex-writer. For at least a year I couldn’t even read a book, much less write one. My husband and my new agent were more stubborn than me and more or less insisted that I persist. This time I made sure I had the novel fully researched, plotted and planned before I started, so that I would never be faced with that dark thicket of uncertainty that it is easy to blunder into half way through the writing of a book.
Your work often portrays the quiet complexities of life. How do you bring tension and intrigue into those everyday moments without relying on big dramatic events?
‘Ordinary’ lives are full of incident, disappointment, regret. The micro-humiliations of everyday life can be quite confounding for the people experiencing them. As long as you walk alongside your characters and don’t look down on them, their emotional hurdles are every bit as riveting as more ostentatious dramas.
Are there any particular authors or books that have deeply influenced your writing? What are you currently reading that inspires you?
Great writing of any genre or flavour inspires me. I like to move between the vast landscapes and conflicts of westerns like Lonesome Dove and the intimate smalltown lives of Elizabeth Strout. Both have the same capacity to take me out of myself and show me something new. I admire dexterity in plotting, because it is so hard to do. For me, writing is all about the rhythm of every sentence. It should have a light bounce, like a table tennis ball. It’s an effect most writers achieve without even thinking about it. Then occasionally you read something that lands on the ear like a fridge falling down a flight of stairs.
Finally, what’s next for you? Can you share any details about upcoming projects or ideas you’re excited to explore?
I don’t have any firm or even infirm ideas for my next novel yet. I think there is something unseemly about chasing after inspiration. As with an old-fashioned courtship, I would really rather it made the first move.
Q&A: Clare Chambers, Author of ‘Shy Creatures’
Elise Dumpleton·Writers Corner·November 13, 2024·4 min read
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We chat with author Clare Chambers about Shy Creatures, which is an alluring literary mystery full of secrets and lies, where an art teacher at a psychiatric hospital in 1960s England finds her life turned upside down by the arrival of a mysterious patient who has spent decades living in complete isolation with his elderly aunts in a decrepit Victorian house.
Hi, Clare! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I was born in 1966 in the suburbs of South London and have lived most of my life within a few miles of where I grew up. I wrote my first novel at 22 during what would now be called a Gap Year in New Zealand. My first job was in publishing – as an editorial secretary at the literary publisher Andre Deutsch Ltd. Since then I have also worked as a freelance editor, school administrator, and a university tutor. The unexpected success of Small Pleasures, my ninth novel, has finally enabled me to give up other work and write full time. I am married with three grown-up children.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
As a nerdy schoolgirl, using big words and telling stories was a form of showing off that seemed to bring me the attention I craved. I suppose my love of reading came before my love of writing – one just grew into the other.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
The first book you ever remember reading: Ant and Bee
The one that made you want to become an author: The Bell by Iris Murdoch.
The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty
Your latest novel, Shy Creatures, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Psychiatry, Art, Memory, Silence, Badgers
What can readers expect?
The old fashioned virtues of character and plot. Set in 1964 in a large progressive psychiatric hospital, it is the story of the relationship between an art therapist, Helen, and a mute patient called William. He has been discovered living in a semi-feral state in a house nearby with his elderly aunt, cut off from the outside world for more than two decades. When it emerges that he is a gifted artist, Helen makes it her mission to uncover his strange story.
Where did the inspiration for Shy Creatures come from?
The seed for the novel was a newspaper article from 1952 describing the discovery of a hidden man with disheveled hair and a five foot beard in a house in Bristol, UK, living under the radar of his neighbours and the authorities. He was removed to a nearby psychiatric hospital and appeared to be making progress. A year later the paper reported his death by drowning in the nearby river. I became preoccupied by his sad fate and determined to write a novel that gave him a past and a more hopeful future.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I particularly enjoyed writing the character of Gil, the vain, charismatic psychiatrist with whom Helen is having an ill-judged affair. A disciple of the controversial R. D. Laing who wrote the groundbreaking work The Divided Self, he believes that insanity is ‘an entirely rational adjustment to an insane world’. I have tried to be true to the spirit of 1964; his behaviour may seem outrageous to modern readers, but was not so at the time.
Can you tell us about some of the challenges you faced whilst writing Shy Creatures?
The chief challenge was the structure, which involves two strands, one moving forward in time through 1964 and the other moving backwards from 1964 to 1938. William’s story travels backwards in time in a kind of parody of psychiatry, peeling back the layers until the truth is revealed in childhood. About half way through I realised why so few books are written with this structure. It is quite the challenge to end a chapter on a cliffhanger and know that you are never going to revisit this period again to explain what happened next. (Luckily it makes more sense in the reading than in my explanation.)
See also
Q&A: Natasha Bowen, Author of ‘Skin of the Sea’
What do you hope readers take away from Shy Creatures?
I always hope the reader will come away with the curious sensation that I have articulated feelings or experiences that they recognise but had never quite put into words; a sense that, at some level and without ever having met, we know each other.
What’s next for you?
As always when finishing a book I wait patiently for the arrival of a new idea that will form the seed of a novel. Sometimes this process can take a year of more, but I feel it is somehow unseemly to go chasing around for inspiration. As with old-fashioned dating, I want the idea to make the first move.
Lastly, what books have you enjoyed so far this year and are there any that you can’t wait to get your hands on?
Books I have particularly enjoyed this year are: You are Here by David Nicholls; God of the Woods by Liz Moore; James by Percival Everett and Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst is on my Christmas list.
Will you be picking up Shy Creatures? Tell us in the comments below!
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Clare Chambers
Represented by Judith Murray
Judith Murray
Clare Chambers was born in Croydon in 1966 and studied English at Hertford College, Oxford. After graduating she lived for a year in New Zealand where she wrote her first novel Uncertain Terms at the age of 22.
On her return to the UK she started her first job in publishing at Andre Deutsch Ltd, while Diana Athill was still at the helm. It took her a year to work up the courage to show them Uncertain Terms and they published it in 1992 when she was 25. In due course she became an editor there. The unconventional working practices are described in The Editor’s Wife.
Her 2021 novel SMALL PLEASURES was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.
She has three grown-up children and lives in South London with her husband.
KLAM, Cheryl. Learning to Swim. 216p. CIP. Delacorte. 2007. PLB $13.99. ISBN 978-0-385-90387-5; pap. $8.99. ISBN 9780-385-73372-4. LC 2006004603.
Gr 8 Up-It's summer and Steffie is working at a country club on wealthy Jones Island, MD, where her only friend is 60-something fellow-maid Alice. When the 17-year-old nearly drowns, she is saved by hunky lifeguard Keith, who offers her swimming lessons. At this point, it becomes evident how predictable this title will be: Keith slowly falls in love with Steffie and breaks up with his girlfriend. Meanwhile, Steffie's mom, Barbie, suffers from what her daughter terms "love lunacy." She continually falls for married men, gets ditched, and then they have to move to avoid the man and his family. This has happened 14 times already. The teen fears that she is repeating her mother's mistakes and worries that, regardless of how things pan out with her relationship, she and her mom will be moving soon anyway. While Klam's debut chick-lit novel falls prey to some sloppy writing in the first half, and a somewhat silly premise-Barbie forbids Steffie from learning how to swim because her own parents drowned-the antics between the two maids are endearing. Nevertheless, some of the references-especially to clothing brands-seem off the mark from what contemporary teens are after, and may date the book. Authors like Sarah Dessen manage similar topics with tighter writing and more feeling, making this an additional purchase for most libraries.--Jennifer Barnes, Homewood Library, IL
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
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Barnes, Jennifer. "Klam, Cheryl. Learning to Swim." School Library Journal, vol. 53, no. 6, June 2007, p. 150. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A165430567/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e7f0848a. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
KLAM, Cheryl. Learning to swim. Random House, Delacorte. 224p. c2007. 978-0-385-733724. $9.99. S
Steffie Rogers, 17, has, thanks to her mother's "love lunacy," moved 14 times in as many years. Love lunacy happens when her mother, Barbie, falls for a married man and then proceeds through eight stages, beginning with the Secret Smile and eventually reaching the Finger Move--moving to whatever place Barbie's finger lands on when poking blindly at a map. Since Steffie never has the chance to make friends her own age, her best friend is Alice, the 60-year-old woman she works with at the country club. It is at this club where Steffie experiences her own potential love lunacy, falling for Keith, the club's lifeguard. Keith, who has a girlfriend, offers to give Steffie swimming lessons after she nearly drowns. This brings them closer and ultimately serves as a symbol for Steffie's growth and self-awareness.
While the story is one that will pull readers along, there are moments when some of it seems uneven. Steffie has a believable voice and readers will feel close to her. Alice is compassionate and caring, the strong mother figure that Steffie craves. But Barbie is almost a caricature and her transition may leave readers not entirely convinced at the end, while Keith offers advice that does not sound entirely like that from a teen boy. Even with these flaws, however, Learning to Swim is a novel that should land well with readers seeking stories with just enough weight to leave them feeling satisfied, but without so much that it leaves them overwhelmed. Stephanie Squicciarini, Teen Svcs. Libn., Fairport PL, Fairport, NY
S--Recommended for senior high school students.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Kliatt
http://hometown.aol.com/kliatt/
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Squicciarini, Stephanie. "KLAM, Cheryl. Learning to swim." Kliatt, vol. 41, no. 3, May 2007, p. 25. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A164594728/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c88adf40. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
Around 20 years ago I came across three of Clare Chambers' early novels at the same time--Back Trouble, Learning to Swim and A Dry Spell--and was immediately entranced, as were the reviewers of the time. To quote just two: "Charming ... a funny and moving story with a great deal of style," found the Sunday Telegraph; "modern, intelligently observed and highly original," opined the Daily Mail. So when I received a proof of her new novel, Small Pleasures (W&N, July), her first in 10 years, it was like encountering an old friend.
Small Pleasures opens in June 1957, when local paper North Kent Echo has just run a story with the headline "Men No Longer Needed for Reproduction!" following the findings of a study into parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction) in animals. This prompts a slew of letters to the editor, mostly complaints, but one from a married young Swiss woman, Gretchen Tilbury of Sidcup, who claims that her 10-year-old daughter Margaret is the result of a virgin birth. Jean Swinney, the features editor, is given the story.
Approaching 40, Jean has come to an acceptance of sorts about the narrow parameters of her life; unmarried and childless, she lives with her widowed mother, who is a difficult, demanding woman. But as Jean investigates Gretchen's claim--setting up medical tests and digging into her past--she becomes closer to the Tilbury family, and develops an aching sense of what she has missed out on.
When we speak over the phone, due to the coronavirus lockdown, Chambers tells me that the seed for Small Pleasures was sown some 20 years ago, when she happened to catch the tail end of an interview on BBC Radio 4's "Woman's Hour". The interviewee was journalist Audrey Whiting, who was recalling the time she worked for a newspaper in the mid-1950s when it ran a competition to find a "virgin mother". Chambers thought it sounded like the basis for a novel but, at the time, she was wasn't writing in that vein. "I filed it away and thought, 'Maybe one day I'll go back to that.'" At the time she was writing "contemporary, light, romantic comedy--and it didn't really strike me as being that kind of book".
It wasn't until 2015 that Chambers returned to the "virgin birth" plot. She had spent precious years writing a novel that "just didn't work", in her words. "That [experience] made me very jittery about my writing. it shook my confidence, really." But with the encouragement of a new agent, Judith Murray at Greene & Heaton, she decided to try. "I thought, 'OK, I'll have one more go at writing a book and if this one fails as well, I really will hang up my pen.'"
Late blooming
In the novel, as Jean looks into Gretchen's claim about her daughter's origins, she becomes closer to the whole family, but particularly Gretchen's husband, Howard. Her first impressions are of a thin, stooped, balding man, but she soon starts to see beyond his appearance to his kindness, intelligence and dry wit. It is, as Chambers says, "a late-flowering love affair between two unattractive people--well, average people, not glamorous people". Jean glimpses a second chance at the things she believed were long out of her reach.
Chambers herself lives where her characters do, on the edge of London's south-easternmost suburbs. The novel's physical setting was on her doorstep: the neat 1930s semis with carefully tended gardens have not changed so much since the 1950s perhaps, but the expectations of those living there certainly have. A central theme in the novel is the conflict between personal fulfilment and duty, particularly for Jean: "It wasn't even that she felt she was making huge sacrifices. It was just what you had to do, there was no choice. It was just your lot, or what you ended up with. That must have been true for a lot of unmarried daughters.
"[Readers] know that the sexual revolution is coming, the 1960s are coming. Life is about to get better for most people. But the characters don't know that, so they don't have our sense of disappointment in their lives. They are living them thinking they are normal, which makes it all the more poignant, really." It is indeed a moving novel, which perfectly balances Jean's reawakening with the solving of the mystery of Gretchen's "virgin birth", and the ending is devastating.
Small Pleasures is Chambers' seventh novel. She wrote her first novel straight after graduating from Hertford College, Oxford, while in New Zealand, accompanying her then boyfriend--now husband--who was on a teaching exchange. Living on the edge of a small town, without a work visa, provided her with the perfect opportunity: "I thought, 'Well if I don't write a book this year then I'm really not a writer.' Everyone always says, 'Oh, if only I had the time', and time is what I had." She returned to England with a manuscript, having decided that, even if her novel was never published, she wanted to work with books.
She wrote to Andre Deutsch on a whim, choosing the small publishing house simply because it had published one of her favourite childhood books. It was then run by the legendary publisher Tom Rosenthal, whose secretary happened to be off sick when Chambers' letter arrived. "They rang up and said, 'Do you fancy doing a bit of typing?'" She started as an editorial secretary in 1990 and worked her way up to editor within five years. While she was there, Andre Deutsch editor Diana Athill bought the novel Chambers had written in New Zealand. "I was the most junior person in the building and my job then was typing contracts--and I had to type my own!" Uncertain Terms was published in 1992 and was reviewed by Penelope Fitzgerald in the Evening Standard--"a moving as well as very funny first novel".
Learning the ropes
She left Andre Deutsch in 1995 to have children and continue writing. Five more novels followed--all excel; lent--including Learning to Swim, which won the 1998 Romantic Novelists' Association Award, and The Editor's Wife, which drew on her experiences at Andre Deutsch. More recently she has been working in a school part-time to support her writing, as the majority of writers must, but will now take up a Royal Literary Fund fellowship at the University of Kent in September, which involves teaching but will allow plenty of time for her own writing. Of a typical writing day she says, "I don't think, 'Today I've got to write a book.' I think, 'Today I've got to write a page, a good page.' Every day I sit down to write a good page, maybe two. Never more than two. If I think about it incrementally like that, I don't feel so overwhelmed.
"When I start a book, I know it's going to take me two or three years and I want it to be a pleasurable experience. I won't start anything until I'm absolutely driven. If nothing comes to me then I just won't write it. It's not the case that I feel I must produce a book a year because I'm under contract," she says, adding drily, "It's not as though there's a shortage of books out there for people to read." Which may be technically true, but when a writer is as a good as Clare Chambers, I definitely want more.
Metadata
Imprint W&N
Publication 09.07.20
Format HB (14.99 [pounds sterling]), EB (7.99 [pounds sterling])
ISBN 9781474613880/13910
Rights Four territories to date
Editor Federico Andornino
Agent Judith Murray, Greene & Heaton
Alice O'Keeffe @aliceokbooks
Chambers' top three
In a Good Light Arrow, 7.99 [pounds sterling], 9780099469186
First published in 2004, this was longlisted for the Whitbread Book Award (later the Costa Book Awards). "Clare Chambers is a diamond in the dust"-Independent. 13,714 copies sold
The Editor's Wife Arrow, 7.99 [pounds sterling], 9780099469322
"Original and addictive ... reminds us of the rare pleasure that an intelligent tale with a happy ending brings"-Daily Telegraph. Chambers' sixth novel. 12,462 copies sold
Learning to Swim Arrow, 6.99 [pounds sterling], 9780099277637
Chambers' third novel won the Romantic Novelists' Association Best Novel Award in 1998. "An intelligent, escapist read ... well-written and funny"-Daily Express. 11,161 copies sold
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The Stage Media Limited
http://www.thebookseller.com
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O'Keeffe, Alice. "Clare Chambers' latest novel, set in England in the 1950s, centres on a young woman's mysterious claim of a 'virgin birth'." The Bookseller, no. 5882, 1 May 2020, pp. 22+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A622574288/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4bf26b63. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
Small Pleasures
Clare Chambers. Custom House, $27.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-06-309472-7
In Chambers's affecting latest (after the YA mystery Burning Secrets), the year is 1957 and Jean Swinney is a single Englishwoman approaching 40 who cares for her demanding mother and lives for the small pleasures in life--like pottering in her vegetable patch or loosening her girdle at the end of the day. Jean works as features editor for the North Kent Echo. Her new assignment is to interview Gretchen Tilbury, who claims to have delivered a child through virgin birth. Wanting to keep an open mind, Jean meets with the no-nonsense Gretchen, who was confined to an all-female nursing home, St. Cecilia's, with rheumatoid arthritis at the time of conception. Jean also meets Gretchen's charming 10-year-old daughter, Margaret, and her dedicated husband, Howard. Jean arranges for Gretchen and Margaret to undergo medical tests at Charing Cross Hospital to prove if parthenogenesis actually took place. As the months pass, Jean becomes more and more enmeshed in the lives of the Tilbury family even as her friendship with Howard threatens to turn into something more. Chambers does an excellent job of recreating the austere texture of post-WWII England. In Jean, the author creates a character who strives admirably to escape her cloistered existence. Chambers plays fair with Gretchen's mystery, tenderly illuminating the hidden yearnings of small lives. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 PWxyz, LLC
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"Small Pleasures." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 35, 30 Aug. 2021, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A675461547/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4f401274. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
Chambers, Clare SMALL PLEASURES Custom House/Morrow (Fiction None) $27.99 10, 5 ISBN: 978-0-06-309472-7
In the spirit of Barbara Pym's novels and the classic film Brief Encounters, Chambers provides an updated portrait of the vaunted British upper lip and its associated postwar values.
When the suburban North Kent Echo runs a story on parthenogenesis in small animals, it gets a curious letter to the editor in response: "I have always believed my own daughter (now ten) to have been born without the involvement of any man," writes Mrs. Gretchen Tilbury of Sidcup. When the opportunity arises to investigate this intriguing virgin birth, Jean Swinney is eager to take on the assignment; it will be a nice distraction from her usual humdrum work. Given the social patterns of 1950s Britain, Jean's beat consists chiefly of feature pieces of appeal to housewives, money-saving tips, recipes, and the like. Jean's personal life is equally nonstimulating, as she shares a joyless home with her agoraphobic and needy mother, and she finds a welcome respite in her growing attachment to the Tilbury family. As clues to the mystery of "Our Lady of Sidcup" gradually reveal themselves to Jean, she finds herself in a relationship that might provide her with a last chance at domestic contentment. An awareness of the high cost of that potential happiness weighs heavily on Jean, and a bittersweet aura pervades Chambers' gentle sketch of an unassuming, highly intelligent woman daring to contravene convention. In a departure from similar, yet tamer, depictions of postwar English life, Chambers acknowledges a broad range of human experience. Jean's foibles, along with those of her irksome mother and other characters, are presented with sympathy, but readers in search of comfortable solutions will have to reassess their need to tie everything up with a vintage-style bow.
Chambers' tone is sweet, which is not the same as saccharine.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Chambers, Clare: SMALL PLEASURES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A673650057/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0d6aab0c. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
SMALL PLEASURESBy Clare Chambers
It's June 1957, and The North Kent Echo, a suburban English newspaper, has received a letter from a woman declaring that her daughter, now 10, was the result of a virgin birth. The only female journalist at the paper, the sensible Jean Swinney, resigns herself to taking the assignment to investigate the woman's claims (''It's women's interest, after all,'' the news editor says dismissively). Jean's skepticism is challenged when witnesses corroborate that the letter writer was bedridden and under constant vigilance in an all-female medical ward at the time of her daughter's conception, making any sort of sexual activity nigh impossible.
This is the starting point of ''Small Pleasures,'' the British novelist Clare Chambers's first work of fiction in nearly 10 years, and although the mystery of the virgin birth drives the plot along, it becomes an almost incidental backdrop in a novel that is quietly affecting in unexpected ways. Jean's days revolve around her work at the paper, where she is treated as ''one of the chaps,'' and the care of her disagreeable, stiflingly needy mother. The pleasures in her life are small indeed, her indulgences limited to the occasional cigarette and ice cream, and to admiring a drawer full of trinkets she collects -- soaps, perfume, stationery, still in their original packaging. All the characters in ''Small Pleasures'' seem to be struggling: trapped in an unhappy marriage; suffering abuse from an aging relative in the throes of senility; or, in one particularly harrowing case, resigned to an existence transpiring entirely within a coffinlike iron lung.
As Jean spends time with the woman she is investigating, who is revealed to be an attractive dressmaker, she chances upon a family life she covets, including a charming daughter and a husband with whom Jean guiltily begins to fall in love. The dressmaker, in turn, does not appear happy in her seemingly idyllic marriage, harboring repressed wishes of her own. Again and again, however, characters choose duty -- which Jean pictures as a ''woman, tall and gaunt, with long hair scraped back into a bun'' -- over happiness, as Chambers examines, sympathetically and incisively, how much self-sacrifice people should bear at the expense of their personal freedom.
The most captivating glimpse of Jean's oppressive self-denial comes during a weeklong trip with her mother to a coastal town, where they are stranded indoors along with other hotel guests during a heavy rain. The holiday is depicted with such sharp hilarity, including scenes of the endlessly complaining elderly Mrs. Swinney, it could be unfolding in a Jane Austen drawing room.
After sensitively elucidating her characters' private hopes, Chambers proceeds to crush them in a series of cruel little twists. The virgin birth at the heart of the novel becomes the ultimate symbol of the lengths to which we delude ourselves in the name of hope, ''that treacherous friend.'' Religious belief serves as a beacon that characters cling to for self-preservation. The dressmaker reassuringly explains away the worrying voices her daughter occasionally hears as belonging to angels; the same faith is what gives the woman in the iron lung the strength to bear her condition, and the means by which she rationalizes the male visitor who appears uninvited at her bedside: ''Angels are always male, aren't they?''
With discreet wit and dry humor, Chambers captures the hypocrisy of an era that was so punitive for women. (Jean recounts how a doctor savored telling her she'd probably never be able to bear a child after she'd suffered through a clandestine abortion.) Peppering old household tips between chapters as sly commentary on the action -- ''Good uses for sour milk,'' for example, appears when things begin to sour toward the end -- Chambers reproduces the everyday minutiae of postwar British suburbia, from a dust-colored wool skirt to a pudding made of tinned pears and evaporated milk. Her language is beautiful, achieving what only the most skilled writers can: big pleasure wrought from small details.
Virginia Feito's first novel, ''Mrs. March,'' was published in August. SMALL PLEASURES By Clare Chambers 343 pp. Custom House. $27.99.
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PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Ariel Davis FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Feito, Virginia. "Likely Story." The New York Times Book Review, 28 Nov. 2021, p. 19(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A684115537/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4ae29750. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
For Clare Chambers, the function of her novels is both simple and profound: they are what she calls a "reaching out" to readers, a chance to share "a moment of communion."
"In my novels I am trying to put into words feelings and insights that readers may not have articulated to themselves but nevertheless recognize as being exactly what they have always thought," she says via Zoom from her home in London. "This creates a connection between two people--writer and reader--who have never met and may never meet."
For her latest novel, Shy Creatures (Mariner, Nov.), which features a young unmarried woman in a questionable relationship and a plot inspired by bizarre real-life events, Chambers looked to the past for characters and stories to build those connections. It was while she was researching her previous novel, Small Pleasures (2020), that she stumbled across a decades-old news story about what she calls a "hidden man."
"I was browsing by key words: mystery, unsolved, scandal," Chambers says. "I found these clips about a 47-year-old man, Harry Tucker, who in 1952 was discovered in a house in Bristol, England, disheveled, with a long beard, and obviously quite disturbed. He had been living under the radar with an elderly aunt. No one had seen him for 25 years. The neighbors didn't know there was a man living on the property. He was taken to a psychiatric hospital, and he seemed to be making good progress."
Intrigued, Chambers dug deeper, but all she could uncover about Tucker was an inquest into his death by drowning one year later. "He'd absconded from the hospital and fallen into a river--such a sad end to his all-too-brief lamentable liberation," she says. "I thought, I'd love to write him a better ending, something that explains how he got into this situation but also how he got out of it."
Born in 1966 in East London, Chambers grew up the youngest daughter of a bookish family, a foundation that would serve her well later in life. "My father was an English teacher," she says. "He would always read to us. My sister would read to me. Even now my husband reads to me every night."
Chambers attended Oxford University, studied English at Hertford College, and graduated in 1988. She and her future husband spent the next year in New Zealand, where he was teaching. She published her first novel, Uncertain Terms (1992), when she was just 25. "It was good practice," she says of the book, "and I had confidence and enthusiasm. But if I had known then what I know now, I probably would have put it aside. But when you're young, you're impatient, and when someone agrees to publish, you think, yes, great, now, tomorrow!"
After Uncertain Terms, Chambers published seven more novels--all of them romantic comedies--and gathered accolades. Learning to Swim (1998) won the Romantic Novelists Association's Novel of the Year award, and In a Good Light (2004) was longlisted for a Whitbread Award. Despite her success, with her eighth outing, Burning Secrets (2011), Chambers says she felt her books hadn't really "done anything." She was in her 40s, and a long period followed when nothing was working. She finished a novel that was rejected. She couldn't figure out what had gone wrong and felt like she'd wasted years writing it. "I thought, now I'm 50 years old and I've got a bad track record," she says. "I'm not a celebrity; I'm not a debut author. I felt like I'd never get published again, but my husband encouraged me to just keep writing, to write my way out of it."
That experience--and her husband's advice--led Chambers to try something different. In 2020 she published Small Pleasures, based on the true story of a woman who claimed to be a virgin mother. It was the first time she'd used a newspaper article as the basis of a book. "I was listening to a radio show interviewing the journalist who had scooped the story in the 1950s," she says. "I thought it was a great plot for a novel, but I knew it wasn't a comedy. I knew there must be a sad story underneath all of this, because a virgin birth obviously wasn't true."
Chambers tells an equally sad story in Shy Creatures: a mute, unkempt man named William Tapping is found living in a run-down house in a London suburb, where for decades he has been unseen and unknown, cared for by his now-deceased aunts. After his discovery, William is shipped to the Westbury Park psychiatric hospital, where he meets Helen Hansford, a 30-something art therapist who thinks her new patient has artistic talent. She is also having an affair with a married doctor at the facility.
While William's real-life counterpart died in the early 1950s, Chambers decided to set Shy Creatures in 1964, which, she says, allowed her to write about an interesting time in the history and evolution of psychiatry, with R.D. Laing's seminal The Divided Self published in 1960.
"Art therapy was a new discipline in the '60s, so I thought having a female-male nonromantic relationship between Helen and William would be a good way into the story," she says. "She would be an interesting foil to him, and we could see the way sexual politics had gotten her into a kind of straight jacket. One of the ways people have conflicts is with flawed relationships. It's hard to make happiness interesting. If you look at the great memoirs, they usually involve bad parenting and terrible childhoods. Happy and interesting memoirs are rare, and I think the same is true of fiction. The more conflict, or potential for conflict, the more interesting the story."
Chambers attributes her fascination with mysteries and scandals from the not-too-distant past to getting older. "You're less interested in the future because there's less of it for you," she says. "And it's a kind of nostalgia. I think nostalgia is a false god and you should be wary of it. I try not to write the past as a kind of rosy glow but as realistically foggy."
Those efforts to capture the past have, according to Chambers's U.S. editor, Rachel Kahan, clearly paid off. "I picked up Small Pleasures after it had first hit bestseller lists in the U.K.," she says. "I was so completely bowled over by Clare's skill at writing an extraordinary novel about the life of seemingly ordinary people--you think you've wandered into the life of a fairly average person, and then suddenly you're on the edge of your seat."
For Chambers, those seemingly ordinary people are another invitation to connect. "As a reader, I feel the writer is saying, 'I know you; you know me,' and I would love readers to have that feeling when they read something I've written," she says. "That we know each other."
BY LOUISA ERMELINO
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Ermelino, Louisa. "Ghosts of the Past: In mining mysteries and scandals of the last century, Clare Chambers hopes to deeply connect with modern readers." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 36, 23 Sept. 2024, pp. 30+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810712123/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=94d1a15a. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
Chambers, Clare SHY CREATURES Mariner Books (Fiction None) $30.00 11, 12 ISBN: 9780063258228
The arrival of a mysterious recluse at a British psychiatric hospital unlocks secrets from the past and sets in motion possibilities for the future.
In 1964, Britain has not yet been reinvigorated by the youth revolution or the "Beatles phenomenon," and many of its people are still marked by their World War II experiences; this is a stifling world of good manners, bad food, and limited opportunities for women. Thirty-four-year-old Helen Hansford, however, has cracked the mold by choosing to work as an art therapist in Westbury Park, a psychiatric hospital, where she has met and begun a consuming affair with charismatic, married doctor Gil Rudden. An unusual patient, William Tapping, 37, arrives at the hospital; he doesn't speak and hasn't left his house in decades. His last living relative having died, Westbury Park becomes William's home, a refuge where he can practice his considerable creative skills in Helen's art class. At this point, the narration opens up to intersperse Helen's story with chapters from William's perspective, slowly revealing the reasons for his isolation, withdrawal, and silence. In fastidious prose well suited to the novel's period setting, Chambers traces William's story back in time while advancing Helen's growing difficulties with Gil and efforts to aid her struggling niece, Lorraine, now also a patient. While evocative of a buttoned-up time, the novel's consciously understated tone (bad things are referred to as "unpleasantness") muffles the few dramatic moments. More persuasive is the mood, redolent of post-war adjustments, and Chambers' quiet but precise observations of circumstance (often drab), options, and individuals. Despite some two-dimensional minor characters, this is a finely detailed and modulated work, based on true events, that looks benignly on its characters and their trajectories.
A composed period piece that pays sharp attention to the little things.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Chambers, Clare: SHY CREATURES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883695/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=61874e67. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers review – trauma unearthed
This article is more than 5 months old
The follow-up to Small Pleasures is set in a mid-century psychiatric hospital, as an art therapist delves into a patient’s past
Joanna Briscoe
Sat 24 Aug 2024 02.30 EDT
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Following up a dark horse triumph such as Clare Chambers’s 2020 novel Small Pleasures can present a challenge. Chambers had been steadily but quietly published, and then had a gap of almost a decade before that breakthrough ninth novel became a critical and word-of-mouth hit. Longlisted for the Women’s prize, this quietly dazzling work was rightly acknowledged as a small masterpiece.
Her 10th novel, Shy Creatures, confirms her as one of our most talented writers, inhabiting something of the territory of Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Taylor and placing her outside contemporary fashions, although there are echoes of Tessa Hadley and Sarah Waters. Shy Creatures returns to the mid-century, profoundly English suburbia of Small Pleasures, is also inspired by a real event, and is sometimes slower but just as quirky, acutely observed and beautifully written as its predecessor.
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Helen Hansford is an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital in Croydon, in an era encompassing knockout drugs and more progressive approaches. Here she teaches “her favourite group of the week – male alcoholics”. She is also having an affair with the charismatic anti-establishment psychiatrist Dr Gil Rudden, who is distantly related to her through his wife.
Helen’s life is rumbling along unwisely, swinging between occasional romantic highs – “exulting in the mere fact of each other’s existence” – and the indignities of being a mistress. Then the hospital receives a call about an altercation in a derelict house nearby. Enter an unkempt mute with waist-length hair and beard. William Tapping, 37 and barely schooled, has spent his life virtually off-grid and undocumented among elderly aunts, in a situation of sequestered paranoia the reader has yet to understand.
Helen dedicates impressive amounts of time and thought to her patient, and the “hidden man” begins to show his talent for art. She soon embarks on an amateur detective trail to establish what has happened in his past. Through phone calls and meetings with figures from William’s previous life, she starts to understand what has caused his trauma, while simultaneously reflecting on her own life’s mistakes. The narrative scrolls back from 1964 to 1960, and, interleaved with present action, moves through the previous two decades until it lands in 1938, by which time all is revealed.
Chambers is a superb historian, but the earlier flashbacks that establish William’s existence of poverty and depression among eccentric aunts are a slow build that can be overloaded with period detail, for all the quiet irony and accurately portrayed despair. This is a grim world of deveined kidney pudding, camphor and threats of borstal. But even in these more static passages, Chambers’s exquisite prose is a consistent pleasure, while the acuity of her observation possesses beauty and universality. As we start to understand the details of a childhood in which “the authorities” are to be feared, the pace picks up again and the mystery aches to be solved.
Chambers’ exquisite prose is a consistent pleasure, and the acuity of her observation possesses beauty and universality
In the present of 1964, Helen’s teenage relative Lorraine ends up at the hospital as a patient, and, enlightened psychiatrist though he may be, charmer Gil’s dangerous influence on women becomes increasingly apparent. While Helen retreats, Gil more than encourages the young, mentally unwell Lorraine to stroke his ego with her crush. Focusing on her protege instead of her former lover, Helen discovers that William had once tasted freedom by spending a holiday in the country cottage of a family called Kenley, after which a terrible event had taken place involving William and his best friend, Francis Kenley. Helen manages to track down Francis, who offers hope on several levels, and his mother Marion, a truly inspiring character. The revelations about William thicken.
The accuracy of Chambers’s observational skills can be almost uncanny, especially her descriptions of human emotions. Helen’s mother prompts “a wave of guilt swiftly followed by a cancelling backwash of resentment”. Marital arguments involve “a lower-wattage exchange of nagging and chuntering”. A voice is “bright with swallowed disappointment”. Dark humour rumbles beneath even her most melancholy evocations; irony and compassion weave through her portraits of repressed lives that finally glimmer with some hope of liberation. The novel’s ending is subtle but complete, and infinitely moving.
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Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers is published by W&N (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Learning to Swim
Learning to swimClare Chambers' novel, Learning to Swim ranks very high on my list of favorite books to reread. It's the sort of story that if I happen to be reading it on the bus I'm likely to be so absorbed that I might miss my stop. Or that reading it on my lunch break means I'll be so involved in it that I lose track of time and get back to my desk a few minutes late. I read it several years ago, so the details (unsurprsingly) faded enough that I only had a vague sense of what happened in the story, and I couldn't tell what was going to happen next. I'd be reading and would think, "oh, yeah, that's right, now I remember". I flipped to the back to see how many pages there were (not to see how much I had left to read in order to hurry to finish it, on the contrary I didn't want it to end) and caught a glimpse of a line on the last page and was a bit bewildered. "Was the ending bittersweet when I read it before?" I thought to myself. 'Have I so completely forgotten things?" Well, I'm not going to tell you how it ends, happy, bittersweet or otherwise. This is one you really must read for yourself.
I'm a little hesitant to write about it, though I'm not sure why. Maybe because I do like it so much. It's a coming of age story and I have this fear I'll make it sound like one big silly cliché, which it isn't. Things aren't helped much by the cover illustration of my copy (I lifted the above cover from the web which is only slightly better), which makes it look sort of fluffy and mindless and it doesn't really bear much in common with the actual story. The blurb on the cover calls it "as witty as Barbara Trapido and as wickedly comic as Kate Atkinson", both authors I highly respect, and I think I have to agree with the comparison. I suppose it could be called a comfort read, but it's an intelligent and well written comfort read. Aside from being an excellent coming of age story, it's about family and friendship, as well as love and second chances. Chambers is an excellent writer, and the story is funny and clever, but never in an obnoxious, self-conscious way that clever books can sometimes be.
I'm not entirely sure I can explain why I love this book so much. I think I'm drawn to the characters who are likeable though far from perfect--the sort of people I wouldn't mind knowing in real life. I can also relate to the period Chambers writes about (the same time I was growing up) as well as the feelings and emotions she describes--the isolation of being a bit outside of things (especially outside the popular group in school) and then finding a friend/soulmate who really helps open up the world and makes you feel not so alone anymore. The book begins in the present, sort of near the end of the story and then goes back in time to fill in the gap. Abigail Jex is a cellist who chances upon Marcus Radley, the brother of a childhood friend, who she's not seen for more than a decade, at a charity concert.
"'Thirteen years,' we replied simultaneously, without needing any time for totting up. The ghost of a smile was gone. We were both remembering the occasion of our last meeting: the heat in the chapel; the schoolgirl soprano breaking the last of us down; the windy graveside. There was a moment's awkward silence, then in a determined effort to get the conversation on safer ground, he said, 'You're a professional cellist now, then?' I nodded. 'That's good--good you kept it up'."
The awkward moment belies the fact that Abigail was once an almost permanent fixture at the Radley household. Just when Abigail needed a friend most in school, Frances Radley showed up and the two became fast, if somewhat unlikely, friends. An only child, Abigail's parents are traditional and conservative and maybe just a little boring. There are always people coming and going in the Radley household and the family is flamboyant and bohemian, a natural draw for Abigail. Abigail harbors a secret crush on Marcus, or Rad as he's called. Being older than the girls, Rad is naturally off doing his own thing, and Abigail never lets on, but it doesn't stop her from becoming a part of the family otherwise.
I think I've forgotten what it's like to be a child. They know more than we think. I'm amazed sometimes what my ten-year-old niece will come up with. I wonder where on earth she learns things sometimes? And kids notice more than we think as well. No matter how firmly buried family secrets may be, sooner or later there's an epiphany and they all come to light. And that's what happens to Abigail. And then a chain of events is set in motion that ends in tragedy and the end of a friendship. And this unexpected meeting between Abigail and Rad years later brings all her old feelings to the fore. And then she tells us her story--one I couldn't put down either time.
I already know I will reread this book yet again, so I didn't bother to go and find it a place on my bookshelves, but it remains in a pile by my bedside. And I've got Clare Chambers' book, In a Good Light at the ready. I read it about the same time as I did Learning to Swim and am ready for a reread. I think I liked it equally as much, though I'll put a few books in between the two. I know I should read one of her other books, like The Editor's Wife, which I have on hand, but I have this fear it won't live up to my expectations set by her earlier novels.
Is it just me or do you have a favorite novel you could read over and over again and never tire of?
Prize tale of bickering in bed
This article is more than 25 years old
By Fiachra Gibbons, Arts Correspondent
Wed 21 Apr 1999 21.49 EDT
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Bounder baronets and the poor peasant girls they ravish and discard have been knocked from the heights of romantic fiction by suburban couples who bicker in bed.
Clare Chambers yesterday won the Parker Romantic Novel of the Year award, worth £5,000, with her tale of a tortured affair between two London teenagers which would not look out of place on This Life.
Ms Chambers knows a thing or two about complicated romances having married one of her old teachers. 'I am very surprised it has won,' she said. 'It is not what you would call a conventional romantic novel.'
Learning To Swim is set in outer suburbia where the Radley family from bohemian north London have been cast. Poor, hopelessly conventional Abigail Jex is drawn to their alternative lifestyle and their smart but aimless son Rad, only to have her adolescent dreams crushed.
But they meet again 13 years later and end up arguing over whether to get married or just live together.
Croydon-born Chambers's first book, Uncertain Terms, brought comparisons with Whitbread-winner Kate Atkinson and the acerbic comedies of Barbara Trapido.
Her stories are a world away from the hotly tipped favourite, The Wind From The Hills, by Jessica Stirling, the nom de plume of 60-something Glaswegian Hugh Rae.
He has donned a metaphorical dress to write several blockbusting romances, and this one, set on Mull, was highly praised.
Derek Parker, chairman of the judges and editor of the Author, said readers of romantic fiction should no longer be allowed to choose the shortlist. 'It's not a good idea.
They tend to like their heroines pure and their heroes swashbuckling. First and foremost they should be good books, though it is an essential that the novel pricks the heart. And the writer that brought the tear closest to the lash was Clare Chambers.'
Ms Chambers, 32, an Oxford English graduate, has three children and now lives in Hayes, Kent. Last year's winner was Kiss And Kin by Angela Lambert.
Learning To Swim, published by Arrow, £5.99.
The following is an extract from Clare Chambers' award-winning book, Learning To Swim.
(The scene is a party. Our hero and heroine are alone in a quiet corner.)
'It's 10.45,' I [Abigail] said. 'It feels like it ought to be earlier.' Moron, I thought. Fortunately I appeared to have got away with it.
'I am probably going to regret this,' said Rad.
'Well do it then,' I said.
'I might regret it if I don't. Do you mind?' And before I had a chance to reply he leaned forward and kissed me. This is Rad was my only thought.
'There. I've been meaning to do that for ages,' he said, as if kissing me was another tiresome chore, like getting his shoes reheeled, which could be ticked off the list. 'Now you're probably going to slap me around the face or say something completely crushing.'
'No I'm not,' I said, still too stunned to come back with anything clever.
'Well, that's a relief.' He kissed me again, more confidently this time, and even as it was happening I was memorising every detail so that I would be able to relive it a thousand times in my imagination.
As he pressed against me his shirt buttons must have got caught up in the threads on the front of my dress because when we pulled apart there was the popping of breaking cotton and hundreds of tiny jet beads clattered to the floor. Rad started trying to retrieve them. He took a step towards me again and then stopped. 'I can smell burning.'
At first I thought he was joking, and that I was about to come out of some resounding cliché about it being my heart, but he wasn't listening.
'The shed's on fire,' he said, plunging through the door. I followed him, scattering beads.