After reading Jane Gardam's Bilgewater, I want to read everything she has ever written. Every novel and every short story. Actually I have already read Old Filth as well as a number of her short stories and knew she was very good, but it has taken me ages to get around to another of her many novels. So very many wonderful authors and I want to read them all, all their work, but you know how it goes. All those books just clamoring for attention. So Jane Gardam goes onto the list of 'must read everything she has ever written list'. At this rate I will need to live forever to get through them all.
What is a Bilgewater you might be asking yourself right now. Bilgewater is a young girl living with her father who is the housemaster at an all boys school. A lone girl with no mother save for the delightful matron Paula, of Dorset extraction and filled with much good sense who somehow ended up at the school at the age of seventeen and never left. Her favorite refrain? "Beware of pity". And with a girl like Bilgewater, this is perhaps a necessity. She sees herself as a block of a girl--"ugly, quaint and square". Her real name is Marigold, which she thinks is quite beautiful, but Bilgie it is to the boys and the rest of the world.
Bilgewater is a corruption of "Bill's daughter". That's her dad who generally has his nose in a book. He is the epitome of distracted scholar. Bilgewater likes more than anything else to spend time in the park or swim,and over the course of the holidays she has the school pool to herself. Her father will wander in looking for her with a book in hand, his attention split between daughter and Aeschylus with Aeschylus usually winning. But there is for Bilgewater something along the lines of splendid isolation. She is sort of an island of one, something of a misfit, or at least she thinks of herself as so. I think Marigold is actually most splendid in and of herself. This is a wonderful coming of age story. So quirky and yet so perfect. Time and again she sells herself short.
Bilgewater is really a very special story. Jane Gardam reminds me of Barbara Comyns or Rachel Ferguson. There is something almost magical about the world she has created. It is both unique and quaint and of some other time and place, yet entirely relatable, too. And Marigold is a most delightful and relatable character. Misfitish or not I want to be like her. She may be in splendid isolation but she is not alone. Not with Paula close by and her uncle and father and even some of the boys at the school with whom she has crushes in both the literal and figurative senses. How could a young girl, thirteen at the start of the story, not feel plain and square in a school full of boys and worse compared to the Vision, Grace Gathering who is the Headmaster's daughter. She is an inspiration and a rival and maybe even a friend but also a nemesis.
This is a story of growing up and falling in love, being thwarted in love and maybe finding yourself. It's the sort of book I want to flip back to the first page and start reading all over again now that I know what has happened and have read for the 'story'. Now I want to read for the pleasure of Gardam's writing and style, her wit and whimsy. There is so much to the book, slender as it is. You want to furiously turn pages, but now I want to go back and slow myself down. I'm not sure when I will be able to squeeze it in, but my next Gardam novel is going to be A Long Way from Verona, which sounds like it could be even better.
This was my September prompt book (I am finishing a second book by Sherman Alexie and will write about it next week). October is "ghosts and hauntings" and I have a small stack of books already waiting to choose from, but more about those later. And Bilgewater? Another top ten read, which I warmly press into your hands to read.