At the beginning of Clare Chambers’ new novel, Shy Creatures, there is a sly allusion to some of her literary forebears: “(Helen) was looking for Larkin, although she secretly preferred Betjeman, whom Gil considered a ‘silly old maid’… Virginia Woolf was ‘largely unreadable’, DH Lawrence a genius, Graham Greene was ‘fiction, not literature'” – and so on.
Clever, in more ways than one. Chambers has been compared to both Larkin and his old pen pal Barbara Pym, and the aesthetic education her protagonist Helen Hansford receives comes from her older lover, who is not only one of her senior colleagues at a psychiatric hospital in south London, but also the husband of one of her distant cousins. In other words, there is something about his influence that we are clearly meant to suspect, even – or perhaps especially – when Chambers turns his taste into a jab at her own work: “They didn’t like the idea of being stuck in the past, and they distrusted anyone who resisted change.”
Shy Creatures is set in the past, mostly in 1964 but also in the decades before – like its predecessor, 2022’s popular Small Pleasures – and Chambers again delves into the details of the period with an almost paradoxical mix of lightness and relish. There are references to the Third Programme, Zephyr cars, the Wrens and, more generally, to lives defined, comforted and inhibited by a certain kind of Englishness: “‘Ambrose Whystan-Pettigrew was a convincingly tortured Othello compared to Edmund Garnett’s enchanting Desdemona,’ he read, then paused over a team photograph of the victorious First Team rugby team in flannel and blazer, clutching the County Cup. ‘Nineteen thirty-eight. They had no idea what was coming.'”
Helen is clueless. The early parts of the novel focus on her complicated but frustrating relationship with the charismatic Gil, who wants to marry her but can’t until his last child leaves home, even though that’s still over a decade away. Helen is already 34, a little too old to be rocking the 60s, but not quite young enough to sit it out either. Then, just as their relationship seems to be running its course, Gil meets an exciting new patient, William Tapping, and the affair takes on new life as Gil and Helen work together to find out what’s wrong with him.
This kind of premise belongs in a Barbara Pym novel, in which, as Larkin put it in a 1977 essay, “a small incident … sets in motion a chain of small events … observed or even narrated by a protagonist who tempers an ironic perception of life’s absurdities with a keen awareness of its capacity to hurt.” Helen is an art therapist and Tapping proves to be a gifted illustrator; Gil is a progressive psychiatrist following in the footsteps of RD Laing (whom he calls “Ronnie”), seeking to find a therapeutic approach that is not based on the premise that there is something wrong with the patient. But their relationship turns out to be a surprising framework of sorts, and Tapping himself, his recovery and his backstory eventually take over the novel.
